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THE HOME

Shall the home be our world . . or the toorld our home ?

■ / i ■ .I _i„

THE HOME

ITS WORK AND INFLUENCE

CHARLOTTE PERKINS OILMAN

NEW YORK

CHARLTON COMPANY

1910

* - ^ fmim OF

/// MABISOH AVE., M. ^. 0*

• »

V . !

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idb262A

A •

"w \ "•' - 9

I - - '^ I

Copyrighted 1903

Republished, November, 1910

THE CHARLTON CO.

^01

PHnt«d by The Co-Operative PrcM, New York City

».

To eveiy Man who maintains a Honi<
To every Woman who " keeps house*"—
To eveiy House-Servant, owned, hired, or married-
To every Boy and Girl who lives at Home —
To every Baby who is bom and reared at Home —
In the hope of better homes for all
this book is dedicated.

CONTENTS

L
IL

IV.
V.

VI.

vn.

VIII.

IX.
X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

xrv.

XV.

XVI.
XVII.

Intboductobt, .

The Evolution of thx Hom^

DOHBSTIO MtTHOLOOT,

Pbsssnt Conditions^

Thb HoMB as ▲ WOBKSHOP,

housbwifb,
Thb Hohb as a Wobkshop.

HoUSElCAIDy • • •

HoHB-CoOKINOy •

Dombstio Abt, . , •
Domestic Ethics,
Domestic Entebtainment,
The Ladt of the House,
The Child at Home,
The 6ibl at Homb, .
Home Influence on Men,
Home and Social Pboobbss,
Lines of Advance,
Results, . • * •

Thb

The

PAOB
3

14
36
62,

104
124
143
160
184
206
230
252
272
800
823
842

TWO CALLINGS

/ hear a deep voice through wneaey dreaming^
A deepf eofi^ tender^ eotd-beguUing voice;
A luUing voice thai bids the dreams remain^
Thai calms my restlessness and duUs my pain.
Thai ihriUs and fUs and holds me iUl in seeming
There is no oiher sound on earih — no choice.

'* Home! ** says ihe deep voice, ** Home! " and eofUg
stngtng

Brings me a sense of safety unsurpassed;
So old! so old! The pHes above ihe wave —
The shelter of the sione-blocked, sliadowy cave-^
Security of sun-kissed ireetops swinging —

Safety and Home at last!

** Home ** says ihe sweet voice, and warm Comfort riseip

Holding my soul with velvet-fingered hands;
Contfort of leafy lair and lapping fur,

»>

TWO CALLINGS

Soft couches^ cushions, curtains, and the stir
Of easy pleasures that the body prizes.

Of soft, swift feet to serve the least commands.

I shrink — half rise — and then it murmurs " Duty!

Again the past rolls out — a scroll unfurled;
AUegiance and long labor due my lord —
Allegiance in an idleness abhorred —
/ am the squaw — the sUwe—the harem beauty —

/ serve and serve, the handmaid of the world.

My soul rebels — but harki a new note thrillvng.
Deep, deep, past finding — I protest no more;

The voice says ** Love! " and all those ages dim

Stand glorified and jttstified in him;

I bow — I kneel — the woman soul is willing —
** Love is the law. Be stOll Obey I Adore!**

And then — ah, then! The deep voice mummn
" Mother! **
And all life answers from the primal sea;
A mingling of all Ivllabies; a peace
That asks no understanding; the release
Of nature's holiest power — who seeks another?

Home? Home is Mother — Mother, Home — to me.

• • •
vui

TWO CALLINGS
"Honut" aayi the deep voice; "Home and Eaty
Pleamrel
Safety and Camforit Laws Of Life well kepi!
Love! ** and my heart rose thritting at the word;
** Mother I '* it nestled down and never stirred;
" Duty and Peace and Laoe beyond all measure!
Home! Safety! Comfort! Mother! ** — and 1 slept.

A bugle call! A etear, keen, ringmg cry.
Relentless --eloquent — that found the ear

Through fold on fold of slumber, sweet, profound —

A widening wave of universal sound.

Piercing the heart — fXling the utmost sky —
/ wake — I must wake! Hear — for I must hear!

" The World! The World is crying! Hear its needs!

Home is a part of life — / am the whole!
Home is the cradle — shall a whole life stay
Cradled in comfort through the working day?
I too am Home — the Home of all high deeds —

The only Home to hold the human soul!

** Courafire! — the front of conscious life! *' it cried;
** Courage that dares ti die and dares to live!

TWO CALLINGS

Why should you prate of safety? Is life meant
In ignominums safety to he spent?
Is Home best valued as a place to hide?

Come out, and give what you are here to give! '

" Strength and Endura/ncef of high action boml **
And all that dream of Comfort shrank away.

Turning its fond, beguiling face a^ide:

So Selfishness and Luxury and Pride

Stood forth revealed, till I grew fierce with scorn.
And burned to meet the dangers of the day,

" Duty? Aye, Duty! Duty! Marie the word! **
/ turned to my old standard. It wa^ rent

From hem to hem, and through the gaping place

I saw my v/ndone duties to the race

Of man — neglected — spumed — how had I heard
That word and never dreamed of what it meant!

" Duty! Unlimited — eternal — new! "

And I? My idol on a petty shrine
Fell as I turned, and Cowardice and Sloth
Fell too, unmasked, false Duty covering both-^
While the true Duty, all-embracvng, high.

Showed the clear line of noble deeds to do.

TWO CALLINGS

And then the great voice rang out to the $wn^

And all my terror left me^ all my shame,
Wl^ every dream of joy from earliest youth
Came hack and lived! — that joy unhoped was truth,
^^ joy 9 aU hope, all truth, all peace grew one,
life opened clear, and Lovet heme was its name!

when the great word " Mother! '* rang once more,

I saw at last its meaning and its place;
Not the blind passion of the brooding past.
But Mother — the World's Mother — come at hist.
To love as she had never loved before —

To feed and guard and teach the hu/man race.

The world was fuU of music clear and high!

The world was full of light! The world was free!
And If Awake at last, in joy untold.
Saw Love and Duty broad a^ life unrolled —
Wide as the earth — unbounded as the sky —

Home was the World — the World was Home to me!

THE HOME

We are here to perform our best service to society, and
to find our best individual growth and expression ; aright
home is essential to both these uses.

The place of childhood's glowing memories, of youth's
ideals, of the calm satisfaction of mature life, of peace-
ful shelter for the aged; this is not attacked, this we
shall not lose, but gain more universally. What is here
asserted is that our real home life 19 clogged and injured
by a number of conditions which are not necessar}^
which are directly inimical to the home ; and that we shall
do well to lay these aside.

As to the element of sanctity — ^that which is really
sacred can bear examination, no darkened room is needed
for real miracles; mystery and shadow belong to ju^
glers, not to the. truth.

The home is a human institution. All human institu-
tions are open to improvement. This specially dear and
ancient one, however, we have successfully kept shut,
and so it has not improved as have some others.

The home is too important a factor in human life to
be thus left behind in the march of events ; its influence
is too wide, too deep, too general, for us to ignore.

Whatever else a human being has to meet and bear,
he has always the home as a governing factor in the for-
mation of character and the direction of life.

INTRODUCTORY

This power of home-influence we cannot fail to seei
but we have bowed to it in blind idolatry as one of un^
mixed beneficence, instead of studying with jealous care
that so large a force be wisely guided and restrained.

We have watched the rise and fall of many social in**
stitutions, we have seen them change, grow, decay, and
die; we have seen them work mightily for evil — or as
mightily for good ; and have learned to judge and choose
accordingly, to build up and to tear down for the best
interests of the human race.

In very early times, when the child-mind of inex-
perienced man was timid, soft, and yet conservative as
only the mind of children and savages can be, we re-
garded all institutions with devout reverence and
fear.

Primitive man bowed down and fell upon his face be-
fore almost everything, whether forces of nature or of
art. To worship, to enshrine, to follow blindly, was in-
stinctive with the savage.

. The civilised man has a larger outlook, a clearer, bet*
ter-ordered brain* He bases reverence on knowledge, he
loses fear in the light of understanding; freedom and
self-government have developed him. It does not come
so readily to him to fall upon his face — ^rather he lifts
his face bravely to see and know and do. In place of

THE HOME
the dark and cruel superstitions of old time, with the
crushing weight of a strong cult of priests, we have a
free and growing church, branching steadily wider as
more minds differ, and coming nearer always to that
final merging of religion in life which shall leave them
indistinguishable. In place of the iron despotisms of old
time we have a similar growth and change in govern-
ments, approaching always nearer to a fully self-govern-
ing condition. Our growth has been great, but it has
been irregular and broken by strange checks and rever-
sions ; also accompanied, even in its heights, by parallel
disorders difficult to account for.

In all this long period of progress the moving world
has carried with it the unmoving home; the man free,
the woman confined ; the man specialising in a thousand
industries, the woman still limited to her domestic func-
tions. We have constantly believed that this^ was the
true way to live, the natural way, the only way. What-
ever else might change — and all things did — ^the home
must not. So sure were we, and are we yet, of this, that
we have utterly refused to admit that the home has
changed, has grown, has improved, in spite of our un-
shaken convictions and unbending opposition.

The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living
substance is the brain — ^the hardest and most iron-bound

[6]

INTRODUCTORY
is well. Given a sufficiently deep conviction, and facts
are but as dreams before its huge reality.

Our convictions about the home go down to the utter-
most depths, and have changed less imder the tooth of
time than any others, yet the facts involved have altered
most radically. The structure of the home has changed
from cave to tent, from tent to hut, from hut to house,
from house to block or towering pile of ^^ flats " ; the
functions of .the home have changed from every incipient
industry known to past times, to our remaining few ; the
inmates of the home have changed, from the polygamous
group and its crowd of slaves, to the one basic family re-
lation of father, mother, and child ; but our feelings have
remained the same.

The progress of society we have seen to be hindered
by many evils in the world about us and in our own
characters; we have sought to oppose them as best we
might, and even in some degree to study them for wiser
opposition.

Certain diseases we have traced to their cause, removed
the cause, and so avoided the disease; others we are just
beginning to trace, as in our present warfare with ** the
white plague," tuberculosis.

Certain forms of vice we are beginning to examine
similarly^ and certain defects of character; we are leam-

THE HOME
kig that sodet J is part of the Eving wcnrld and comes
tinder the action of natural law as much as any other
form of lif e«

But in all this study of social factors affecting dis-
ease and vice and character, we have still held that the
home — our most universal environment — ^was perfect and
quite above suspicion.

We were right at bottom. The home in its essential
mature is pure good, and in its due development is pro-
gressively good; but it must change with society's ad-
vance; and the kind of home that was whoUy beneficial
in one century may be largely evil in another. We must
forcibly bear in mind, in any honest study of a long-
accustomed environment, that our own comfort, or even
happiness, in a given condition does not prove it to be
good.

Comfort and happiness are very largely a matter of
prolonged adjustment. We like what we are used ta
When we get used to something else we like that too —
and if the something else is really better, we profit by the
change. To the tired fanner it is comfort to take off his
coat, put up his yam-stockinged feet on a chair, and
have his wife serve him the supper she has cooked. The
tired banker prefers a dressing gown or lounging jacket^
slippers, a well-dressed, white-ha^ded wif e» and a noat

INTRODUCTORY

naid or stately butler to wait on the table. The
domestic Roman preferred a luxurious bath at the hands
of his slaves. AH these types find comfort in certain
surroundings— yet the surroundings differ.

The New England farmer would not think a home
comfortable that was full of slaves — even a butler he
would find oppressive ; the New York banker would not
enjoy seeing his wife do dirty work. Ideals change —
even home ideals; and whatever kind of home we have,
so that we grow up in it and know no other, we learn to
love. Even among homes as they now are, equally en->
joyed by their inmates, there is a wide scale of differ^
ence. Why, then^ is it impossible to imagine something
still further varying from what we now know ;
yet to the children bom therein as dear and deeply
loved?

Again let us remember that happiness, mere physical
comfort and the interchange of family affection, is not
all that life is for. We may have had ^^ a happy child-*
hood," as far as we can recall; we may have been idol*
ised and indulged by our parents, and have had no wish
mgratified ; yet even so all this is no guarantee that the
beloved home has given us the best training, the best
growth. Nourmahal, the Light of the Harem, no doubt
enjoyed herself — but perhaps other surroundings might

THE HOME
have done more for her mind and soul. The questions
raised here touch not only upon our comfort and happi-
ness in such homes as are happy ones, but on the forma-
tive influence of these homes; asking if our present home
ideals and home conditions are really doing all for
hiunanity that we have a right to demand. There is a
difference in homes not only in races, classes, and indi-
viduals, but in periods.

The sum of the criticism in the following study is this :
the home has not developed in proportion to our other
institutions, and by its rudimentary condition it arrests
development in other lines. Further, that the two main
errors in the right adjustment of the home to our present
life are these: the maintenance of primitive industries in
a modem industrial community, and the confinement of
women to those industries and their limited area of ex^
pression. No word is said against the real home, the
true family life ; but it is claimed that much we consider
essential to that home and family life is not only lih^
necessary, but positively injurious.

The home is a beautiful ideal, but have we no others?
** My Country '' touches a deeper chord than even
" Home, Sweet Home." A homeless man is to be pitied,
but " The Man without a Country " is one of the hor-
rors of history. The love of mother and child is beauti-

INTRODUCTORY

fill; but there is a higher law than that-'^the love of one

another.
In our great religion we are taught to love and serve

all mankind. Every word and act of Christ goes to show
the law of universal service. Christian love goes out to
all the world ; it may begin, but does not stay, at home.
The trend of all democracy is toward a wider, keener
civic consciousness ; a purer public service. All the great
problems of our times call for the broad view, the large
concept, the general action. Such gain as we have made
in human life is in this larger love ; in some approach to
peace, safety, and world-wide inter-service; yet this so
patent common good is strangely contradicted and off-
set by cross-currents of primitive selfishness. Our own
personal lives, rich as they are to-day, broad with the
consciousness of all acquainted races, deep with the con-
sciousness of the uncovered past, strong with our uni-
versal knowledge and power; yet even so are not happy.
We are confused — ^bewildered. Life is complicated,
duties conflict, we fly and fall like tethered birds, and our
new powers beat against old restrictions like ships in
dock, fast moored, yet with all sail set and steam up.

It is here suggested that one cause for this irregular
development of character, this contradictory social ac-
tion, and this wearing unrest in life lies unsuspected in

THE HOME
6ar homes ; not in their undying essential factors, but in
those phases of home life we should have long since
peacefully outgrown. Let no one tremble in fear of los-
ing precious things. That which is precious remains
and will remain always. We do small honour tc nature's
laws when we imagine their fulfilment rests on this or
that petty local custom of our own.

We may all have homes to love and grow in without
the requirement that half of us shall never have anything
else. We shall have homes of rest and peace for all, with
no need for half of us to find them places of ceaseless
work and care. Home and its beauty, home and its com-
fort, home and its refreshment to tired nerves, its in-
spiration to worn hearts, this is in no danger of loss or
change ; but the home whidi is so far from beautiful, so
wearing to the nerves and dulling to the heart, the home
life that means care and labour and disappointment, the
quiet, unnoticed whirlpool that sucks down youth and
beauty and enthusiasm, man's long labour and woman's
longer love — this we may gladly change and safely lose.
To the child who longs to grow up and be free ; to the
restless, rebelling boy; to the girl who marries all too
hastily as a means of escape; to the man who puts his
neck in the collar and pulls while life lasts to meet the
uuoeasing demands of his little sanctuary; and to the

INTRODUCTORY
woman — ^the thousands u{>on thousands of women, who
work while life lasts to serve that sanctuary by night and
day — ^to all these it may not be unwelcome to suggest
that the home need be neither a prison, a workhouse, nor
a consuming fire.

Home — ^with all ihat tiie tweet word means ; home for
CKch of us, in its best sense; yet shorn of its inordinate
expenses. Treed of its grinding labours, open to the
blessed currents of progress that lead and lift us all— •
thai we may have and keep for all time.

It is, therefore, witii no iconoclastic frenzy of destruc-
titm, but as one bravdy pruning a most precious tree,
that this book is put forward; inquiring as to what is
and what is not vital to ilie subject ; and claiming broadly
that with such and such clinging masses cut away, tiie
real home life will be better established and more richly
f raitf nl for good than we have trer known before*

THE EVOLUTION OF THE HOME

WE have been slow, slow and reluctant, to ap-
ply the laws of evolution to the familiar
facts of human life. Whatever else might
move, we surely were stationary; we were the superior
onlookers — ^not part of the procession. Ideas which have
possessed the racial mind from the oldest times are not
to be dispossessed in a day; and this idea that man is
something extra in the scheme of creation is one of our
very oldest. We have always assumed that we were made
by a special order, and that our manners and customs
were peculifiirly and distinctively our own, separated by
an immeasurable gap from those of ** the lower animals."
Now it appears, in large succeeding waves of proof,
that there are no gaps in the long story of earth's con-
tinual creation ; some pages may be lost to us, but they
were once continuous. There is no break between us and
the first stir of life upon our planet. Life is an un-
broken line, a ceaseless stream that pours steadily on ; or
rather, it grows like an undying tree, some of whose
branches wither and drop off, some reach their limit

EVOLUTION OP THE HOME

part way up, but the main trunk rises ever higher.
We stand at the top and continue to grow, but we still
carry with Us many of the characteristics of the lower
branches.

At what point in this long march of life was intro-
duced that useful, blessed thing — ^the home? Is it some-
thing new, something distinctively human, like the
church, the school, or the post office? No. It is trace-
able far back of humanity, back of the mammals, back
of the vertebrates ; we find it in most elaborate form even
among insects.

What is a home? The idea of home is usually con-
nected with that of family, as a place wherein young
are bom and reared, a common shelter for the repro-
ductive group. The word may be also applied to the
common shelter for any other permanent group, and to
the place where any individual habitually stays. Con-
tinuous living in any place by individual or group makes
that place a home; even old prisoners, at last released,
have been known to come back to the familiar cell be-
cause it seemed like ^^ home " to them. But ^' the home,"
in the sense in which we here discuss it, is the shelter of
the family, of the group organised for purposes of re-
production. In this sense a beehive is as much a home
as any human dwelling place — even more, perhaps. The

THE HOME
snow hut of the Eskimo, the tent of hides that coven
the American savage, the rock-bound fastness of the
cave-dweller — ^these are homes as truly as the costliest
modern mansion. The burrow of the prairie dog is a
home, a fox's earth is a home, a bird's nest is a home, and
the shelter of the little ^^ seahorse " is a home^ Wherever
the mother feeds and guards her little onejs, — more espe-
cially if the father helps her, — ^there is, for the time
being, h<Hne.

This accounts at once for the bottomless depths of our
attachment to the idea. For millions and millions of
years it has been reborn in each generation and main-
tained by the same ceaseless pressure. The furry babies
of the forest grow to consciousness in nests of leaves, in
a warm stillness where they are safe and comfortable,
where mother is — and mother is heaven and earth to tiie
baby. Our lightly spoken phrase " What is home with-
out a mother?" covers the deepest truth; there would
never have been any home without her. It is from these
antecedents that we may trace the f orrmation of fliis deep-
bedded concept, home.

The blended feelings covered by the word are a group
of life's first necessities and most constant joys: shelter,
quiet, safety, warmth, ease, comfort, peace, and love.
Add to these food, and you have the sum of the animal^

EVOLUTION OF THE HOME
gratafiofttiQii. Hodm k ifidked hMYtii to Idm. The worM
ootaide is^ to the ammal with a home, m field of excite-
inent^ exertkni, and danger. He goes out to eat, in more
or leas danger of being eaten; but if he can seeure his
prey and drag it home he is then perfectly happy. Often
he must feed where it falls, but then home k the place
for the aftor-dmner nap.

With the granuBivora there is no thought of home.
The peaceful grao^^ater drops foal or fawn, kid, calf, or
kunhy where chance may find her in the open, and feeds at
random under the sky. Vegetables food of a weak quality
Eke grass has to be constantly followed tip ; thei^ is no
tinie to gather armfuls to take home, even if there were
homes — or arms. But the beasts of prey have homes
and love than, and the little timid things that live in in-
stant danger-^ — ^they, too, have homes to hide in at a mo-
moat's notice. These deep roots of animal satisfaction
uaderlie the later growths of sentiment that so enshrine
the home idea with us. The retreat, the shelter both from
weather and enemies, this is a prknal root.

It is interesting to note that there is a strong connec*
ti<Hi stifl between a disagreeable climate and the love of
home. Where it is comfortable and pleasant out of
doors, then you find the life of the street, the market
place, the caf4, the plaza. Where it is damp and dai^k

THE HOME
and chill» where rain and wind, snow and ice make it
unpleasant without, there you fiipd people gathering
about the fireside, and boasting of it as a virtue — ^merely
another instance of the law that makes virtue of neces-
sity.

Man began with the beasts' need of home and the
beasts' love of home. To this he rapidly applied new
needs and new sentiments. The ingenious ferocity of
man, and his unique habit of preying on his own kind)
at once introduced a new necessity, that of fortification.
Many animals live in terror of attack from other kinds
of animals, and adapt their homes defensively as best
they may, but few are exposed to danger of attack from
their own kind. Ants, indeed, sometimes make war ; bees
are sometimes thieves ; but man stands clear in his pre-
eminence as a destrover of his own race. From this habit
of preying on each other came the need of fortified
homes, and so the^eeling of safety attached to the place
grew and deepened.

The sense of comfort increased as we learned to multi-
ply conveniences, and, with this increase in conveniences,
came decreased power to do without them. The home
where all sat on the floor had not so much advantage in
comfort over " out-of-doors " as had the home where all
fat on chairs, and became unable to sit on the ground

EVOLUTION OF THE HOME
with ease. So safety and comfort grew in the home con-
. cept. Shelter, too, became more complex as door and win-
I dow and curtain guarded us better, and made us more
susceptible to chill. Peace became more dear at home as
war increased outside ; quiet, as life waxed louder in the
world ; love, as we learned to hate each other more. The
more dangerous and offensive life outside, the more we
ding to the primal virtues of the home ; and conversely,
in our imagination of heaven, we do not picture the
angels as bound up in their homes — ^if , indeed, they have
any — but as gladly mingling in the larger love which
includes them all. When we say ** Heaven is my home,''
we mean the whole of it.

The care and shelter of the young is a far larger
problem with us than with our hairy ancestors. Our
longer period of immaturity gives us monogamous mar-
riage and the permanent home. The animal may change
his mate and home between litters ; ours lap. This over-
lapping, long-continuing babyhood has given us more
good than we yet recognise.

Thus we see that all the animal cared for in the home
we have in greater degree, and care for more ; while we
have, further, many home ideals they knew not. One of
the earliest steps in human development was ancestor-
worship. With lower animals the parents do their duty

THE HOME
cheerfully, steadily, devotedly, but there Is no thought of
return. The law of reproduction acts to improve the race
by relentlessly sacrificing the individual, and that in-
dividual, the parent, never sets up a claim to any special
veneration or gratitude.

But with us it is different. Our little ones lasting
longer and requiring more care, we become more con-
scious of our relatim to them. So the primitive parent
very soon set up a claim upon the child, and as the child
was absolutely helpless and in the power of the parent,
it did not tiJee long t» force into the racicd mind this
great back-acting theory. The extreme height is found
where it is made a religion, ancestor-worship, once very
ccmimon^ and still dominant in some of our oldest, t. ^.,
most primitive civilisations, as the Chinese. This an-
cestor-worship is what gave the element of sanctity to
the home. As late as the Roman civilisation its power
was so strong that the home was still a temple to a
dwindling group of household gods — mere fossil grand-
pas — and we ourselves are not yet free from the influence
of Roman civilisation. We still talk in poetic archaisms
of " the altar of the home."

The extension of the family from a temporary repro-
ductive group to a permanent social group is another
human addition to the home idea. To have lived in one

EVOLUTION OF THE HOME
i»ile «li lixs infancy makes that hole familiar and dear
4b tile little fox. To have lived in one nest all his life
makes that nest more familiar and more dear to the rook.
But to have lived in one house for generations, to have
** the home of my ancestors " loom upon one's growing
coDsciousness — this is to enlarge enormously our sense of
the dignity and value of the term.

This development of the home feeling of course hinges
upon the theory of private property rights ; and on An-
other of our peculiar q^ialties, the exaltation of blood-
relationships. Our whole social structure, together with
social progress and social action, rests in reality on socitfl
relationship — ^that is, oil the interchange of special serv-
ices between individuals. But we, starting the custom
at a time when we knew no better, and perpetuating it
blindly, chose to assume that it was more important to be
eonnected physically as are the animals, than psychically
AS human beings; so we extended the original family
grcrap of father, mother, and child into endless collateral
lines and tried to attach our duties, our ambitions, our
nrtues and JKshievements to that group exclusively. The
effect of iiiis on any pennanent home was necessarily to
still f urA^ enlarge and deepen the sentiment attached
to it.

There » anotlier feature of human life, however, which

THE HOME
has contributed enormously to our home sentiment, — ^the
position of women. Having its rise, no doubt, in the over-
lapping babyhood before mentioned, the habit grew of
associating women more continuously with the home, but
this tendency was as nothing compared to the impetus
given by the custom of ownership in women. Women
became, practically, property. They were sold, ex-
changed, given and bequeathed like horses, hides, or
weapons. They belonged to the man, as did the house ;
it was one property group. With the steadily widening
gulf between the sexes which followed upon this arbi-
trary imprisonment of the woman in the home, we have
come to regard " the world " as exclusively man's prov-
ince, and " the home '* as exclusively woman's.

The man, who constitutes the progressive wing of the
human race, went on outside as best he might, organis-
ing society, and always enshrining in his heart the woman
and the home as one and indivisible. This gives the
subtle charm of sex to a man's home ideals, and, equally,
the scorn of sex to a man's home practices. Home to the
man first means mother, as it does to all creatures, but
later, and with renewed intensity, it means his own
private harem — ^be it never so monogamous — ^the secret
place where he keeps his most precious possession.

Thus the word ^* home," in the human mind, touches

EVOLUTION OF THE HOME
the spring of a large complex group of ideas and senti-
ments, some older than humanity, some recent enough
for us to trace their birth, some as true and inalienable
as any other laws of life, some as false and unnecessary as
any others of mankind's mistakes. It does not follow
that all the earliest ones are right for us to-day, because
they were right for our remote predecessors, or that those
later introduced are therefore wrong.

What is called for is a clear knowledge of the course
of evolution of this earliest institution and an under-
standing of the reasons for its changes, that we may dis-
criminate to-day between that which is vital and perma-
nent in home life and that which is unessential and in-
jurious. We may follow without difficulty the evolution
of each and all the essential constituents of home, mark
the introduction of non-essentials, show the evils resultant
from forced retention of earlier forms ; in a word, we may
study the evolution of the home precisely as we study
that of any other form of life.

Take that primal requisite of safety and shelter which
seems to underlie all others, a place where the occupant
may be protected from the weather and its enemies. This
motive of home-making governs the nest-builder, the bur-
row-digger, the selecter of caves ; it dominates the insecti
the animal, the savage, and the modem architect*

THE HOME
Dangers change, and the home must change to suit tibe
clanger. So after the caves were found insufficient, the
lake-dwellers built above the water, safe when the bridge
was in. The drawbridge as an element of safety lin-
gered long, even when an artificial moat must needs be
made for lac^ of lake. When the principal danger is
cold, as in Arctic regions, the home is built thick and
small ; when it is heat, we build tiudc and large ; when it
is dampness, we choose high ground, elevate the home,
lay drains ; when it is wind, we s^ek a sheltered slope, or if
there is no slope, plant trees as a wind-break to protect
the home, or, in the worst cases, make a *^ cyclone cellar."
The gradual development c^ our careful plastering
and glazing, our methods of heating, of cai^eting and
curtaining, comes along this line of security and shelter,
modified always by humanity's great enemy, conservat-
ism. In these mechanical details, as in deeper issues, free
adaptation to changed conditions is hindered by our in-
variable effort to maintain older habits. Older habits are
most dear to the aged, and as the aged have always most
controlled the hcmie, that institution is peculiarly slow to
respond to the kindling influence of changed condition.
The Chaldeans built of brick for years unnumbered, be-
cause clay was their only building material. When they
qprtad into Assyria, where stone was plenty, they con*

EVOLUTION OF THE HOME
ti&ued calmly pnttung up great palaces of sunbaked
brick, — mere adobes — •vnd each new king left the crack-
ing terraces of his predecessor's pride and built another
equally ephemeral. The influence of our ancestors has
dominated the home more than it has any other human in-
stitution, and ihe influence c( our ancestors is necessarily
retroactive.

In the gathering currents of our present-day social
evolution, and especially in this country where progress
m not feared, this heavy undertow is being somewhat
ovfBrcome. Things move so rapidly now that one life'
counts the changes, there is at last a sense of motion in
buman affairs, and so tiiese healthful processes of
change can have free way. The dangers to be met to-
day by the home-butlder are far different from those of
ancient times, and, like most of our troubles, are bu*gely
of our own maUng. Earthquake and tidal wave still
govern our choice of place and material somewhat, and
dimate of course always, but fire is the diief element of
danger in our cities, and next to fire the greatest danger
in the home is its own dirt.

mie savage was dirty in his habits, from our {>o!nt of
view, but he lived in a clean world large enough to hold
Ids little contribution of bones and ashes, and he did not
4dDe his own tent with detritus of any sort. We, in our

THE HOME
far larger homes, with our far more elaborate processes
of living, and with our ancient system of confining
women to the home entirely, have evolved a continuous
accumulation of waste matter in the home. The effort
temporarily to remove this waste is one of the main lines
of domestic industry ; the effort to produce it is the other.

Just as we may watch the course of evolution from a
tiny transparent cell, absorbing some contiguous particle
of food and eliminating its microscopic residuum of
waste, up to the elaborate group of alimentary processes
which make up so large a proportion of our complex
physiology ; so we may watch the evolution of these home
processes from the simple gnawing of bones and tossing
them in a heap of the cave-dweller, to the ten-course
luncheon with its painted menu. In different nations the
result varies, each nation assumes its methods to be right,
and, so assuming, labours on to meet its supposed needs,
to fulfil its local ambitions and duties as it apprehends
them. And in no nation does it occur to the inhabitants
to measure their habits and customs by the effect on life,
health, happiness, and character.

The line of comfort may be followed in its growth like
the line of safety. At first anything to keep the wind
and rain off was comfortable — any snug hole to help
retain the heat of the little animal. Then that old ABC

EVOLUTION OF THE HOME
of all later luxury, the bed, appeared — something soft
between you and the rock — something dry between you
and the ground. So on and on, as ease grew exquisite
and skill increased, till we robbed the eider duck and
stripped the goose to make down-heaps for our tender
flesh to lie on, and so to the costly modem mattress. The
ground, the stamped clay floor, the floor of brick, of
stone, of wood ; the rushes and the sand ; the rug — ^a mere
hide once and now the woven miracle of years of labour in
the East, or gaudy carpet of the West — so runs that line
of growth. Always the simple beginning, and its natural
development under the laws of progress to more and more
refinement and profusion. Always the essential changes
that follow changed conditions, and always the downward
pull of inviolate home-tradition, to hold back evolution
when it could.

See it in furnishing : A stone or block of wood to sit on,
a hide to lie on, a shelf to put the food on. See that
block of wood change under your eyes and crawl up
history on its forthcoming legs — a. stool, a chair, a sofa,
a settee, and now the endless ranks of sittable furniture
wherewith we fill the home to keep ourselves from the
floor withal. And these be-stuffed, be-springed, and up-
holstered till it would seem as if all humanity were newly
whipped* It is much more tiresome to stand than to walk.

THE HOME
If you are confined at home you cannot walk much —
therefore you must sit — especially if your task be a star
tionary one. So, to the home-bound woman came much
sitting, and much sitting called for ever «of ter seats, and
to the wholly home-bound harem women even sitting is
too strenuous ; there you find cushions and more cushions
and eternal lying down. A long way this from the
strong bones, hard muscles, and free movement of the
sturdy squaw. Mid yet a sure product of evolution with
certain modifications of religious and social thought.

Our h<Hnes, thanks to other ideas and habits, are not
thus ultra-cushioned ; our women can stiU sit up, most of
the time, preferring a stuffed chair. And among the
more normal wcNrking classes, stiU largely and blessedly
predominant, neither the sitting nor the stuffing is so evi-
dent. A woman who does the work in an ordinary home
seldom sits down, and when she does any chair feels good.

In decoration this long and varied evoluticm is clearly
und prominently yis%le, both in normal growth, in nat-
ural excess, and in utterly aimonnal variations. So
large a field of study is this that it will be given separate
consideration in the chapter on Domestic Art.

What is here sought is mmply to ^ve a general im-
pression of the continual flux and growth of the home as
an institution, as one under the sa«ie laws bjb those which

EVOLUTION OF THE HOME
govern other institutions, cuftd also of the check to that
growth resultant from our human characteristics of re-
monbering, recording, and venerating the past. The
home, more than any other human phenomenon, is under
that heavy check. The home is an incarnate past to
us. It is our very oldest thing, and holds the heart
more deeply than all others. The omscious thought of
the world is always far behind the march of events, it is
most sa in those departments where we have made definite
efforts to keep it at an earlier level, and nowhere, not
even in religion, has there been a more distinct, persistent,
and universal attempt to maintain the most remote pos-
sible status.

" The tendency to vary," that inadequate name for the
great centrifugal force which keeps the universe swing-
ing, is manifested most in the male. He is the natural
variant, where the female is the natural conservative.
By forcibly combining the wcmian with the home in his
mind, and forcibly compelling her to stay there in body,
then, conversely, by taking himself out and away as com-
pletely as possible, we have turned the expanding lines
of social progress away from the home and left the ultra-
feminised woman to ultra-conservatism therein. Where
this condition is most extreme, as in the Orient, there is
IhuiI progress ; where it is least extreme, as with us, there

«9

THE HOME

is the most progress ; but even with us, the least evolved of
all our institutions is the home. Move it must, somewhat,
as part of human life, but the movement has come from
without, through the progressive man, and has been
sadly retarded in its slow effect on the stationary woman.

This difference in rate of progress may be observed in
the physical structure of the home, in its industrial proc-
esses, and in the group of concepts most closely associ-
ated with it. We have run over, cursorily enough, the
physical evolution of the home-structure, yet wide as have
been its changes they do not compare with the changes
along similar lines in the ultra-domestic world. More-
over, such changes as there are have been introduced by
the free man from his place in the more rapidly pro-
gressive world outside.

The distinctively home-made product changes far less.
We see most progress in the physical characteristics of the
home, its plan, building, materials, furnishings, and dec-
oration, because all these are part of the world growth
outside. We see less progress in such of the home in-
dustries as remain to us. It should be always held in
mind that the phrase ** domestic industry " docs not ap-
ply to a special kind of work, but to a certain grade of
work, a stage of development through which all kinds
pass. All industries were once " domestic," that is, were

EVOLUTION OF THE HOME

performed at home and in the interests of the family.
All industries have since that remote period risen to
higher stages, except one or two which are still classed as
*' domestic," and rightly so, since they are the only in-
dustries on earth which have never left their primal stage.
This a very large and important phase of the study of
the home, and will be given due space later.

Least of all do we see progress in the home ideas. The
home has changed much in physical structure, in spite of
itself. It has changed somewhat in its functions, also in
ipite of itself. But it has changed very little — ^painfully
little — dangerously little, in its governing concepts.
Naturally ideas change with facts^ but if ideas are held
to be sacred and immovable, the facts slide out frcmi
under and go on growing because they must, while the
ideas lag further and further behind. We once held
that the earth was fiat. This was our concept and gov-
erned our actions. In time, owing to a widening field
of action on the one hand, and a growth of the human
brcin on the other, we ascertained the fact that the earth
was round. See the larger thought of Columbus driving
him westward, while the governing concepts of tlie sail-
ors, proving too strong for him, dragged him back.
Then, gradually, with some difiiculty, the idea followed
the fact, and has since penetrated to all minds in civil-

THE HOME
ided oountried. Bat the fitttness of the earth Was not an
essentiid veligious concept, though it was dung to
strongly by the inert religion of the time; nor was it a
dcHnestic concept, something still more inert. If it had
been, it would haye taken far longer to make the change.
What progress has been made in our domestie conr
cepts? The oklesty — ^the pre-human, — shelter, safety,
comfort, quiet, and mother love, are still with us, still
crude and limited. Then follow gradually later senti-
ments of sanctity, privacy, and sex-seclusion ; and still
later, some elements of personal convenience and personal
expression. How do these stand as compared with the
facts? Our safety is really insured by social law and
order, not by any system of home defence. Against the
real dang^:^ of modem life the home is no safeguard.
It is as open to criminal attack as any public building,
yes, more. A public building is more easily and effect-
ively watched and guarded than our private homes.
Sewer gas invades the home; microbes, destructive in-
sects, all diseases invade it also ; so far as civilised life is
open to danger, the home is defenceless. So far as the
home is protected it is through social progress — through
public sanitation enforced by law and the public guard-
ians of the peace. If we would but shake off the prim-
itive limitations of these old concepts, cease to imagina

EVOLUTION OF THE HOME

fhe home to be a safe place, and apply our ideas of
dielter, safety, comfort, and quiet to the City and State,
we should then be able to ensure their fulfilment in our
private homes far more fully.

The mother-love concept suffers even more from its
limitations. As a matter of fact our children are far
more fully guarded, provided for, and educated, by social
efforts than by domestic ; compare the children of a na-
tion with a system of public education with children
having only domestic education ; or children safeguarded
by public law and order with children having only
domestic protection. The home-love and care of the
Armenians for their children is no doubt as genuine and
strong as ours, but the public care is not strong and well
organised, hence the little Armenians are open to mas-
sacre as little Americans are not. Our children are
largely benefited by the public, and would be much more
so if th^ domestic concept did not act too strongly in
limiting mother love to so narrow a field of action.

The later sentiments of sanctity and the others have
moved a little, but not much. Why it is more sacred to
make a coat at home than to buy it of a tailor, to kill a
cow at home than to buy it of a butcher, to cook a pie
at home than to buy it of a baker, or to teach a child at
home than to have it taught by a teacher, is not made

THE HOME

clear to us, but the lingering weight of those ages of
ancestor-worship, of real sacrifice and libation at a real
altar, is still heavy in our minds. We still by race-habit
regard the home as sacred, and cheerfully profane our
halls of justice and marts of trade, as if social service
were not at least as high a thing as domestic service.
This sense of sanctity is a good thing, but it should grow,
it should evolve along natural lines till It Includes all
human functions, not be forever confined to Its cradle,
the home.

The concept of sex-seclusion is, with us, rapidly pass-
ing away. Our millions of wage-earning women are lead-
ing us, by the Irresistible force of accomplished fact, to
recognise the feminine as part of the world around us,
not as a purely domestic element. The foot-binding
process In China Is but an extreme expression of this old
domestic concept, the veiling process another. We are
steadily leaving them all behind, and an American man
feels no jar to his sexuo-dcmiestic sentiments in meeting
a woman walking freely In the street or working in the
shops.

The latest of our home-Ideas, personal convenience and
expression, are themselves resultant from larger develop-
ment of personality, and lead out necessarily. The ac-
cumulating power of individuality developed in large

EVOLUTION OF THE HOME
processes by the male, is inherited by the female;
she, still confined to the home, begins to fill and overfill it
with the effort at individual expression, and must sooner
or later come out to find the only normal field for highly
specialised himian power — the world.

Thus we may be encouraged in our study of dcHnestic
evolution. The forces and sentiments originating in the
home have long since worked out to large social processes.
We have gone far on our way toward making the world
our home. What most impedes our further progress is
the persistent retention of certain lines of industry within
domestic limits, and the still more persistent retention of
certain lines of home feelings and ideas. Even here, in
the deepest, oldest, darkest, slowest place in all man's
mind, the light of science, the stir of progress, is pene-
trating. The world does move — ^and so does the home.

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY

THERE is a school of myths connected with the
home, more tenacious in their hold on the
popular mind than even religious beliefs. Of
all current superstitions none are deeper rooted, none
so sensitive to the touch, so acutely painful in removal.
We have lived to see nations outgrow some early beliefs,
but others are still left us to study, in their long slow
processes of decay. Belief in ** the divine right of kings,"
for instance, is practically outgrown in America; and
yet, given a king, — or even a king's brother, — and we
show how much of the feeling remains in our minds, dis-
claim as we may the idea. Habits of thought persist
through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may
reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue
to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that
doctrine.

Wherever the pouring stream of social progress has
had little influence, — ^in remote rural regions, hidden val-
leys, and neglected coasts, — ^we find still in active fore©
some of the earliest myths. They may change theii

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY
names as new religions take the place of old, Santa
Claus and St. Valentine holding sway in place of forgot-
ten deities of dim antiquity, but the festival or custom
embodied is the same that was enjoyed by those most
primitive ancestors. Of all hidden valleys none has so
successfully avoided discovery as the Home. Church and
State might change as they would — as they must ; science
dianged, art changed, business changed, all human func-
tions changed and grew save those of the home. Every
man's home was his castle, and there he maintained as
far as possible the facts and fancies of the place, unal-
tered from century to century.

The facts have been too many for him. The domestic
hearth, with its undying flame, has given way to the
gilded pipes of the steam heater and the flickering evan-
escence of the gas range. But the sentiment about the
dcHnestic hearth is still in play. The original necessity
for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that
altar fire — ^and it was an altar fire in very truth at one
period — ^has passed with the means of prompt ignition;
the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant
service, but the feelmg that women should stay at home
is with us yet.

The time when all men were enemies, when out-of-doors
was <me pixmiiscuous battlefield, when home, well f orti-

THE HOME

fied, was the only place on earth where a man could rest
in peace, is past, long past. But the feeling that home
is more secure and protective than anywhere else is not
outgrown.

So we have quite a list of traditional sentiments con-
nected with home life well worth our study ; not only for
their interest as archaeological relics, but because of their
positive injury to the life of to-day, and in the hope that
a fuller knowledge will lead to sturdy action. So far
we have but received and transmitted this group of
myths, handed down from the dim past ; we continue to
hand them down in the original package, never looking to
see if they are so; if we, with our twentieth-century
brains really believe them.

A resentful shiver runs through the reader at the sug-
gestion of such an examination. ^^ What ! Scrutinise the
home, that sacred institution, and even question it?
Sacrilegious ! " This very feeling proves the frail and
threadbare condition of this group of ideas. Good
healthy yoimg ideas can meet daylight and be handled,
but very old and feeble ones, that have not been touched
for centuries, naturally dread inspection, and no wonder
— ^they seldom survive it.

Let us begin with one especially dominant domestic
myth, that fondly cherished popular idea — ^** the privacy

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY

of the home.'' In the home who has any privacy? Pri-
vacy means the decent seclusion of the individual, the
right to do what one likes unwatched, uncriticised, un*
hindered. Neither father, mother, nor child has this
right at home. The young man setting up in ^^ cham-
bers," the young woman in college room or studio, at last
they realise what privacy is, at last they have the right
to be alone. The home does provide some privacy for the
family as a lump — ^but it remains a lump — ^there is no
privacy for the individual. When homes and families
began this was enough, people were simple, unspecialised,
their tastes and wishes were similar ; it is not enough to-
day.

The progressive socialisation of himianity develops in-
dividuals; and this ever-increasing individuality suffers
cruelly in the crude familiarity of home life. There sits
the family, all ages, both sexes, as many characters as
persons ; and every budding expression, thought, feeling,
or action has to run the gauntlet of the crowd. Suppose
any member is sufficiently strong to insist on a place
apart, on doing things alone and without giving infor-
mation thereof to the others — ^is this easy in the home?
Is this relished by the family?

The father, being the economic base of the whole struc-
ture, has most power in this direction ; but in ninety-nine

THE HOME
cases in a hundred he has taken his place and his work
outside. In the one hundredth case, where some artist,
author, or clergyman has to do his work at home — ^what
is his opinion then of the privacy of that sacred place?

The artist flees to a studio apart, if possible ; the author
builds him a " den '* in his garden, if he can afford it ;
the clergyman strives mightily to keep " the study '* to
himself, but even so the family, used to Herding, finds
it hard to respect anybody's privacy, and resents it.

The mother — ^poor invaded soul — ^finds even the bath-
room door no bar to hammering little hands. From
parlour to kitchen, from cellar to garret, she is at the
mercy of children, servants, tradesmen, and callers. So
chased and trodden is she that the very idea of privacy
is lost to her mind ; she never had any, she doesn't know
what it is, and she cannot understand why her husband
should wish to have any " reserves," any place or time,
any thought or feeling, with which she may not make
free.

The children, if possible, have less even than the
mother. Under the close, hot focus of loving eyes, every
act magnified out of all natural proportion by the close
range, the child soul begins to grow. Noticed, studied,
commented on, and incessantly interfered with; forced
into miserable self-consciousness by this unremitting

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY

glare; our little ones grow up permanently injured in

character by this lack of one of humanity's most precious

rights — privacy.
The usual result, and p^haps the healthiest, is thi^

bickering which is so distinctive a feature of family life.

The effect varies. Sore from too much rubbing, there is
a state of chronic irritability in the more sensitive ; cal-
lous from too much rubbing there is a state of chronic
indifference in the more hardy ; and indignities are pos-
sible, yes, common, in family life which would shock and
break the bonds of friendship or of love, and which would
be simply inconceivable among polite acquaintances.

Another result, pleasanter to look at, but deeply in-
jurious to the soul, is the affectionate dominance of the
strongest member of the family; the more or less com-
plete subservience of the others. Here is peace at least ;
but here lives are warped and stunted forever by the too
constant pressure, close and heavy, surrounding them
from infancy.

The home, as we know it, does not furnish privacy to
the individual, rich or poor. With the poor there is
such crowding as renders it impossible ; and with the rich
there is another factor so absolutely prohibitive of pri-
vacy that the phrase becomes a laughing-stock.

Private? — a place private where we admit to the most

THE HOME

intimate personal association an absolute stranger; or
more than one? Strangers by birth, by class, by race,
by education — as utterly alien as it is possible to con-
ceive — ^these we introduce in our homes — in our very
bedchambers ; in knowledge of all the daily habits of our
lives — and then we talk of privacy! Moreover, these
persons can talk. As they are not encouraged to talk to
us, they talk the more among themselves; talk fluently,
freely, in reaction from the enforced repression of
** their place," and, with perhaps a tinge of natural bit-
terness, revenging small slights by large comment. With
servants living in our homes by day and night, con-
fronted with our strange customs and new ideas, having
our family affairs always before them, and having
nothing else in their occupation to offset this interest, we
find in this arrangement of life a condition as far removed
from privacy as could be imagined.

Consider it further: The average servant is an ig-
norant young woman. Ignorant young women are
proverbially curious, or old ones. This is not because
of their being women, but because of their being ig-
norant. A well-cultivated mind has matter of its own to
contemplate, and mental processes of absorbing interest.
An uncultivated mind is comparatively empty and prone
to unguarded gossip ; its processes are crude and weak,

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY

the main faculty being an absorbing appetite for events
—the raw material for the thoughts it cannot think.
Hence the fondness of the servant class for '^ penny
dreadfuls *' — ^its preferred food is highly seasoned inci-
dent of a wholly personal nature. This is the kind of
mind to which we offer the close and constant inspection
of our family life. This is the kind of tongue which
pours forth description and comment in a subdomicili-
ary stream. This is the always-open avenue of infor-
mation for lover and enemy, spy and priest, as all history
and literature exhibit; and to-day for the reporter —
worse than all four.

In simple communities the women of the household,
but Uttle above the grade of servant in mind, freely gos-
sip with their maids. In those more sophisticated we
see less of this free current Ox exchange, but it is there
none the less^ between maid and maid, illimitable. Does
not this prove that our ideas of privacy are somewhat
crude — and that they are kept crude — must remain crude
so long as the hcnne is thus vulgarly invaded by low-class
strangers? May we not hope for some development of
luMne life by which we may outgrow forever these coarse
old customs^ and learn a true refinement which keeps in-
violate the privacy of both soul and body in the home?
One other, yes, two other avenues of publicity are

THE HOME
open upon this supposed seclusion. We have seen that
the privacy of the mother is at the mercy of four sets of
invaders: children, servants, tradesmen, and callers.
The tradesmen, in a city flat, are kept at a pleasing
distance by the diunb-waiter and speaking tube; and,
among rich households everywhere, the telephone is a
defence. But, even at such long range, the stillness and
peace of the home, the chance to do quiet continued
work of any sort, are at the mercy of jarring electric bell
or piercing whistle. One of the joys of the country
vacation is the escape from just these things; the con*
stant calls on time and attention, the interruption of
whatever one seeks to do, by these mercantile demands
against which the home offers no protection.

In less favoured situations, in the great majority of
comfortable homes, the invader gets far closer. ** Th^
lady of the house " is demanded, and must come forth.
The front door opens, the back door yawns, the maid
pursues her with the calls of tradesmen, regular and ir-
regular ; from the daily butcher to the unescapable agent
with a visiting card. Of course we resist this as best
we may with a bulwark of trained servants. That is
one of the main uses of servants — ^to offer some protec*
tion to the inmates of this so private place, the home !

Then comes the fourth class — callers. A whole series

j DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY

f of revelations as to privacy comes here; a list so long
f . and deep as to tempt a whole new chapter on that one
/ theme. Here it can be but touched on, just a mention

* of the most salient points.

First there is the bulwark aforesaid, the servant,
trained to protect a place called private from the
entrance of a class of persons privileged to come in.
To hold up the hands of the servant comes the lie ; the
eommon social lie, so palpable that it has no moral
value to most of us — ^** Not at home ! "

The home is private. Therefore, to be in private,
you must claim to be out of it !

Back of this comes a whole series of intrenchments —
the reception room, to delay the attack while the oc-
cupant hastily assumes defensive armour ; the parlour or
drawing room, wherein we may hold the enemy in play,
cover the retreat of non-combatants, and keep some inner
chambers still reserved; the armour above mentioned —
costume and manner, not for the home and its inmates,
but meant to keep the observer from forming an opinion
as to the real home life ; and then all the weapons crudely
described in rural regions as '^ company manners," our
whole system of defence and attack ; by which we strive,
and strive ever iii vain, to maintain our filmy fiction
ftf the privacy of the home.

THE HOME

The sanctity of the home is another dominant domes-
tic myth. That we should revere the processes of nature
as being the laws of Grod is good ; a healthy attitude of
mind. But why revere some more than others, and the
lower more than the higher?

The home, as our oldest institution, is necessarily our
lowest, it came first, before we were equal to any higher
manifestation. The home processes are those which
maintain the individual in health and comfort, or are
intended to; and those which reproduce the individual.
These are vital processes, healthy, natural, indispensa-
ble, but why sacred? To eat, to sleep, to breathe, to
dress, to rest and amuse one's self — ^these are good and
useful deeds; but are they more hallowed than others?

Then the shocked home-worshipper protests that it is
not these physical and personal functions which he holds
in reverence, but " the sacred duties of maternity,'* and
'^ all those precious emotions which centre in the home."

Let us examine this view ; but, first let us examine the
sense of sanctity itself — see what part it holds in our
psychology. In the first dawn of these emotions of
reverence and sanctity, while man was yet a savage,
the priest-craft of the day forced upon the growing
racial mind a sense of darkness and mystery, a system of
"tabu"— of "that which is forbidden." In China

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY

i.: still, as term of high respect, the imperial seat of govern-
ment is called " the Forbidden City.'' To the dim thick

early mind, reverence was confounded with mystery and
e I restriction.

To-day, in ever-growing light, with microscope and
! telescope and Rontgen ray, we are learning the true
reverence that follows knowledge, and outgrowing that
which rests on ignorance.

The savage reveres a thing because he cannot under-
stand it — we revere because we can understand.

The ancient sacred must be covered up; to honour
king or god you must shut your eyes, hide your face,
fall prostrate.

The modem sacred must be shown and known of all,
and honoured by imderstanding and observance.

Let not our sense of sanctity shrink so sensitively
from the searcher; if the home is really sacred, it can
bear the light. So now for these '^ sacred processes of
reproduction." (Protest. "We did not say * repro-
duction,' we said * maternity! ' ") And what is mater-
nity but one of nature's processes of reproduction? Ma-
ternity and paternity and the sweet conscious duties and
pleasures of human child-rearing are only more sacred
than reproduction by fission, by parthenogenesis, by any
other primitive device, because they are later in the

•47

THE HOME

course of evolution, so higher in the true measure of ^
growth; and for that very reason education, the social j
function of child-rearing, is higher than maternity;

later, more developed, more valuable, and so more |e

sacred. Maternity is common to all animals — but we L
do not hold it sacred, in them. We have stultified
motherhood most brutally in two of our main food
products — ^milk and eggs — exploiting this function re- \
morselessly to our own appetites.

In himianity, in some places and classes we do hold
it sacred, however. Why? ** Because it is the highest,
sweetest, best thing we know ! *' will be eagerly answered.
Is it — ^really? Is it better than Liberty, better than
Justice, better than Art, Government, Science, Industry,
Religion? How can that function which is common to
savage, barbarian, peasant, to all kinds and classes, low
and high, be nobler, sweeter, better, than those late-
come, hard-won, slowly developed processes which make
men greater, wiser, kinder, stronger from age to age?

The " sacred duties of maternity *' reproduce the
race, but they do nothing to improve it.

Is it not more sacred to teach right conduct for in-
stance, as a true preacher docs, than to feed one's own
child as docs the squaw? Grant that both are sacred —
that all right processes are sacred — ^is not the relative

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY
sanctity up and out along the line of man's improve-
ment?

Do we hold a wigwam more sacred than a beast's lair
and less sacred than a modem home? If so, why? Do
we hold an intelligent, capable mother more sacred than
an ignorant, feeble one? Where are the limits and
tendencies of these emotions?

The main basis of this home-sanctity idea is simply
the historic record of our ancient religion of ancestor*
worship. The home was once used as a church, as it
yet is in China ; and the odour of sanctity hangs round
it stilL The other basis is the equally old custom of
sex-seclusion — ^the harem idea. This gives the feeling
of mystery and " tabu," of " the forbidden " — ^a place
shut and darkened — ^wholly private. A good, cleaui
healthy, modem home, with free people living and lov-
ing in it, is no more sacred than a schoolhouse. The
ichoolhouse represents a larger love, a higher function,
a farther development for humanity. Let us revere,
let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest,
not the lowest ; the future, not the past !

Closely allied to our sense of home-sanctity and
sprung from the same root, is our veneration for the
dd ; either people or things ; the '^ home of our ances-
tors " being if anything more sacred than our own, and

THE HOME

the pot or plate or fiddle-back chair acquiring imputed
sanctity by the simple flux of time. What time has to
do with sanctity is not at first clear. Perhaps it is our
natural respect for endurance. This thing has lastedf
therefore it must be good ; the longer it lasts the better
it must be, let us revere it !

If this is a legitimate principle, let us hold pilgrimages
to the primordial rocks, they have lasted longer than
anything else, except sea water. Let us frankly wor-
ship the Sim — or the still remoter dog-star. Let us
revere the gar-fish above the shad — ^the hedgehog more
than the cow — ^the tapir beyond the horse — ^they are all
earlier types and yet endure !

Still more practically let us tium our veneration to
the tools, vehicles, and implements which preceded ours
— ^the arrow-head above the bullet, the bone-needle above
the sewing machine, the hour-glass above the clock !

There is no genuine reason for this attitude. It is
merely a race habit, handed down to us from very re-
mote times and founded on the misconceptions of the
ignorant early mind. The scientific attitude of mind
is veneration of all the laws of nature, or works of God,
as you choose to call them. If we must choose and
distinguish, respecting this more than that, let us at
least distinguish on right lines. The claim of any

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY
material object upon our respect is the degree of its use
and beauty. A weak, clumsy, crooked tool acquires no
sanctity from the handling of a dozen grandfathers ; a
good, strong, accurate one is as worthy of respect if
made to-day. It is quite possible to the mind of man
to worship idols, but it is not good for him.

A great English artist is said to have scorned visit-*
ing the United States of America as '* a country where
there were no castles." We might have showed him the
work of the mound-builders, or the bones of the Tri-
ceratops, they are older yet. It will be a great thing
for the human soul when it iSnally stops worshipping
backwards. We are pushed forward by the social
forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our
shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we arc
forced along; still adoring whatever is behind us. We
insist upon worshipping '^the Grod of our fathers."
Why not the Grod of our children? Does eternity only
stretch one way?

Another devoutly believed domestic myth is that of
the " economy " of the home.

The man is to earn, and the woman to save, to expend
judiciously, to administer the products of labour to the
best advantage. We honestly suppose that our method
of providing for human wants by our system of domestic

THE HOME
economy is the cheapest possible ; that it would cost more
to live in any other way. The economic dependence of
women upon men, with all its deadly consequences, is
defended because of our conviction that her labour in the
home is as. productive as his out of it ; that the marriage
is a partnership in which, if she does not contribute in
cash, she does in labour, care, and saving.

It is with a real sense of pain that one remorselessly
punctures this beautiful bubble. When plain financial
facts appear, when economic laws are explained, then it
is shown that our ^' domestic economy " is the most
wasteful department of life. The subject is taken up
in detail in the chapter on home industries ; here the mere
statement is made, that the domestic system of feeding,
clothing, and cleaning humanity costs more time, more
strength, and more money than it could cost in any other
way except absolute individual isolation. The most
effort and the least result are found where each individual
does all things for himself. The least effort and the
most result are found in the largest specialisation and
exchange.

The little industrial group of the home — from two
to five or ten — ^is very near the bottom of the line of
economic progress. It costs men more money, women
more work, both more time and strength than need be

5»

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY
by more than half. A method of living that wastes
half the time and strength of the world is not economical.

Somewhat along this line of popular belief comes
that pretty fiction about ^^ the traces of a woman's
hand." It is a minor myth, but very dear to us. We
imagine that a woman — any woman — ^just because she
is a woman, has an artistic touch, an aesthetic sense, by
means of which she can cure ugliness as kings were
supposed to cure scrofula, by the laying on of hands.
We find this feelingly alluded to in fiction where some
lonely miner, coming to his uncared-for cabin, discovers
a flower pot, a birdcage and a tidy, and delightedly
proclaims — ^ A woman has been here." He thinks it is
beautiful because it is feminine — ^a sexuo-aesthetic con-
fusion common to all animals.

The beauty-sense, as appealed to by sex-distinctions,
is a strange field of study. The varied forms of crests,
Cpmbs, wattles, callosities of blue and crimson, and the
like, with which one sex attracts the other, are interest-
ing to follow ; but they do not appeal to the cultivated
sense of beauty. Beauty — beauty of sky and sea, of
flower and shell, of all true works of art — ^has nothing to
do with sex.

When you turn admiring eyes on the work of those
who have beautified the world for us; on the immortal

THE HOME

marbles and mosaics, vessels of gold and glass, on build-
ing and carving and modeUing and painting; the en-
during beauty of the rugs and shawls of India, the rich
embroideries of Japan, you do not find in the great
record of world-beauty such conspicuous traces of a
woman's hand.

Then study real beauty in the home — ^any home — all
homes. There are women in our farm-houses — ^women
who painfully strive to produce beauty in many forms ;
crocheted, knitted, crazy-quilted, sewed together, stuck
together, made of wax; made — of all awful things — of
the hair of the dead ! Here are traces of a woman's hand
beyond dispute, but is it beauty? Through the hands
of women, with their delighted approval, pours the
stream of fashion without check. Fashion in furniture,
fashion in china and glass, fashion in decoration,
fashion in clothing. What miracle does " a woman's
hand " work on this varying flood of change?

The woman is as pleased with black horsehair as with
magenta reps ; she is equally contented with " anti-
macassars " as with sofa-cushions, if these things are
fashionable. Her " old Canton " is relegated to the
garret when " French China " of unbroken white comes
in ; and then brought down again in triumph when the
modem goes out and the antique comes in again.

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY

She puts upon her body without criticism or objection
every excess, distortion, discord, and contradiction that
can be sewed together. The aesthetic sense of woman
has never interfered with her acceptance of ugliness, if
ugliness were the fashion. The very hair of her head
goes up and down, in and out, backwards and forwards
under the sway of fashion, with no hint of harmony
with the face it frames or the head it was meant to
honour. In her house or on her person '^ the traces of a
woman's hand" may speak loud of sex, and so please
her opposite ; but there is no assurance of beauty in the
result. This sweet tradition is but another of our
domestic myths.

Among them all, most prominent of all, is one so
general and so devoutly accepted as to call for most
thorough exposure. This is our beloved dogma of ^* the
maternal instinct." The mother, by virtue of being a
mother, is supposed to know just what is right for her
children. We honestly believe, men and women both,
that in motherhood inheres the power rightly to care
for childhood.

This is a nature-myth, far older than humanity. We
base the theory on observation of the lower animals.
We watch the birds and beasts and insects, and see that
the mother does all for the young; and as she has no

THE HOME

instruction and no assistance, yet achieves her ends, we
attribute her success to the maternal instinct.

What is an instinct? It is an inherited habit. It
is an automatic action of the nervous system, developed
in surviving species of many generations of repetition;
and performing most intricate feats.

There is an insect which prepares for its young to eat
a carefully paralysed caterpillar. This ingenious
mother lays her eggs in a neatly arranged hole, then
iBtings a caterpillar, so accurately as to deprive him of
motion but not of life, and seals up the hole over eggs
and fresh meat in fuU swing of the maternal instinct.
A cruelly inquiring observer took out the helpless cater-
pillar as soon as he was put in ; but the instinct-guided
mother sealed up the hole just as happily. She had done
the trick, as her instinct prompted, and there was no
allowance for scientific observers in that prompting.
She had no intelligence, only instinct. You may observe
mother instinct at its height in a fond hen sitting on
china eggs— instinct, but no brains.

We, being animals, do retain some rudiments of the
animal instincts ; but only rudiments. The whole course
of civilisation has tended to develop in us a conscious
intelligence, the value of which to the human race is
far greater than instinct. Instinct can only be efficient

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY
in directing actions which are unvaryingly repeated by
each individual for each occasion. It is that repetition
which creates the instinct When the environment of
an animal changes he has to use something more than
instinct, or he becomes ex-tinct !

The human environment is in continual flux, and
changes more and more quickly as social evolution pro-
gresses. No personal conditions are so general and
mivarying with us as to have time to develop an instinct ;
the only true ones for our race are the social instincts —
and maternity is not a social process.

Education is a social process, the very highest. To
collect the essentials of human progress and supply
them to the young, so that each generation may im-
prove more rapidly, that is education. The animals
have no parallel to this. The education of the animal
young by the animal mother tends only to maintain life,
not to improve it. The education of a child, and by
education is meant every influence which reaches it, from
birth to maturity, is a far more subtle and elaborate
process.

The health and growth of the body, the right proc-
esses of mental development, the ethical influences which
Aape character — these are large and serious cares,
for which our surviving driblets of instinct make

THE HOME
no provision. If there were an instinct inherent in
human mothers sufficient to care rightly for their chil«
dren, then all human mothers would care rightly for
their children.

Do they?

What percentage of our human young live to grow
up? About fifty per cent. What percentage are
healthy? We do not even expect them to be healthy.
So used are we to ^' infantile diseases " that our idea
of a mother's duty is to nurse sick children, not to raise
well ones! What percentage of our children grow up
properly proportioned, athletic and vigorous? Ask
the army surgeon who turns down the majority of ap-
plicants for military service. What percentage of our
children grow up with strong, harmonious characters,
wise and good? Ask the great army of teachers and
preachers who are trying for ever and ever to somewhat
improve the adult humanity which is turned out upon
the world from the care of its innumerable mothers and
their instincts.

Our eyes grow moist with emotion as we speak of our
mothers— our own mothers — and what they have done
for us. Our voices thrill and tremble with pathos and
veneration as we speak of " the mothers of great men — ^*
mother of Abraham Lincoln! Mother of Greorge

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY
Washington! and so on. Had Wilkes Booth no
mother? Was Benedict Arnold an orphan?

Who, in the name of all common sense, raises our huge
and growing crop of idiots, imbeciles, cripples, defect-
ives, and degenerates, the vicious and the criminal; as
well as all the vast mass of slow-minded, prejudiced,
ordinary people who clog the wheels of progress? Are
the mothers to be credited with all that is good and the
fathers with all that is bad?

That we are what we are is due to these two factors,
mothers and fathers.

Our physical environment we share with all animals.
Our social environment is what modifies heredity and
develops human character. The kind of country we
live in, the system of government, of religion, of educa-
tion, of business, of ordinary social customs and conven-
tion, this is what develops mankind, this is given by our
fathers.

What does maternal instinct contribute to this sum
of influences? Has maternal instinct even evolved any
method of feeding, dressing, teaching, disciplining,
educating children which commands attention, not to
say respect? It has not.

The mothers of each nation, governed only by this
rudimentary instinct, repeat from generation to genera-

THE HOME
tion the mistakes of their more ignorant ancestors ; like
a dog turning around three times before he lies down on
the carpet, because his thousand-remove progenitors
turned round in the grass !

That the care and education of children have de-
veloped at all is due to the intelligent efforts of doctors,
nurses, teachers, and such few parents as chose to
exercise their human brains instead of their brute in-
stincts.

That the care and education of children are. still at the
disgraceful level generally existent is due to our leav-
ing these noble functions to the unquestioned dominance
of a force which, even among animals, is not infallible,
and which, in our stage of socialisation, is practically
worthless.

Of all the myths which befog the popular mind, of
all false worship which prevents us from recognising
the truth, this matriolatry is one most dangerous.
Blindly we bow to the word ** mother '* — ^worshipping
the recreative processes of nature as did forgotten na-
tions of old time in their great phallic religions.

The processes of nature are to be studied, not wor-
shipped; the laws of nature find best reverence in our
intelligent understanding and observance, not in obsequi-
ous adoration. When the human mother shows that

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY
she understands her splendid function by developing a
free, strong, healthy body ; by selecting a vigorous and
noble mate; by studying the needs of childhood, and
meeting them with proficient services, her own or that of
others better fitted; by presenting to the world a race
of children who do not die in infancy, who are not
pteyed upon by '^preventable diseases," who grow up
straight, strong, intelligent, free-minded, and right-
intentioned; then we shall have some reason to honour
motherhood, and it will be brain-work and soul-work
that we honour. Intelligence, study, experience, sci-
ence^ love that has more than a physical basis — ^human
motherhood — not the uncertain rudiments of a brute in-
stinct!

IV
PRESENT CONDITIONS

THE difference between our current idea of
the home to-day, and its real conditions, is
easily seen. That is, it is easily seen if we
are able temporarily to resist the pressure of inherited
traditions, and use our individual brain power for a lit-
tle while. We must remember, in attempting to lo6k
fairly, to see clearly, that a concept is a much stronger
stimulus to the brain than a fact.

A fact, reaching the brain through any sensory
nerve, is but an impression ; and if a previous impression
,to the contrary exists, especially if that contrary im-
pression has existed, untouched, for many generations,
the fact has but a poor chance of acceptance. ** What ! '*
cries the astonished beholder of some new phenomenon.
" Can I believe my eyes ! *' and he does not believe his
eyes, preferring to believe the stock in trade of his pre-
vious ideas. It takes proof, much proof, glaring, posi-
tive, persistent, to convince us that what we have long
thought to be so is not so. ^^ A preconceived idea '' is
what we call this immoveable liunp in the brain, and i^

PRESENT CONDITIONS
the preoonceiYed idea is deeply imbedded, knit, and
rooted as an ^^ underlying conviction/' and has so ex«
isted for a very long time, then a bombardment of most
undeniable facts bounds off it without effect.

Our ideas of the home are, as we have seen, among the
very deepest in the brain ; and to reach down into those
old foundation feelings, to disentangle the false from
the true, to show that the true home does not involve
this group of outgrown rudiments is difficult indeed.
Yet, if we will but use that wonderful power of thought
which even the most prejudiced can exercise for a while,
it is easy to see what are the real conditions of the aver-
age home to-day. By ^^ average " is not meant an
average of numbers. The world still has its millions of
savage inhabitants who do not represent to-day, but
anthropologic yesterdays, long past.

Even in our own nation, our ill-distributed social ad-
vance leaves us a vast majority of population who do
not represent to-day, but a historic yesterday. Th«
home that is really of to-day is the home of the people
of to-day, those people who are abreast of the thought,
the work, the movement of our times. The real con-
ditions of the present-day home are to be studied here ;
not in the tepee of the Sioux, the clay-built walls of the
Pueblo, the cabin of the ^' Greorgia cracker," or moun-

€8

THE HOME

taineer of Tennessee; or even In the thousand farm*
houses which still repeat so nearly the status of an earlier
time.

The growth and change of the home may be traced
through all these forms, in every stage of mechanical,
industrial, economic, artistic, and psychic development;
but the stage we need to study is that we are now in^
those homes which are pushed farthest in the forefront
of the stream of progress. An average home of to-day, in
this sense, is one of good social position, wherein the hus-
band has sufficient means and the wife sufficient educa-'
tion to keep step with the march of events; one which
we should proudly point out to a foreign visitor as '^a
typical American home."

Now, how does this home really stand under dispas-
sionate observation?

The ideal which instantly obtrudes itself is this: A
beautiful, comfortable house meeting all physical needs ;
a happy family, profoundly enjoying each other's soci-
ety; a father, devotedly spending his life in obtaining
the wherewithal to maintain this little heaven; a
mother, completely wrapped up in her children and de-
fotedly spending her life in their service, working mira-
les of advantage to them in so doing ; children, happy
1 the home and growing up beautifully under its benign

PRESENT CONDITIONS
influence — everybody healthy, happy, and satisfied with
the whole thing.

This ideal is what we are asked to lay aside tempo*
rarily ; and in its place to bring our minds to bear on the
palpable facts in the case. Readers of a specially accu-
rate turn of mind may perhaps be interested enough to
jot down on paper their own definite observations of,
say, a dozen homes they know best.

One thing may be said here in defence of our general
ignorance on this subject: the actual conditions of home
life aire studiously concealed from casual observation.
Our knowledge of each other's homes is obtained princi-
pally by ^^ calling " and the more elaborate forms of
social entertainments.

The caller only reaches the specially prepared parlour
or reception room; the more intimate friends sometimes
the bedroom or even nursery, if they are at the time
what we call ** presentable " ; and it is part of our con-
vention, our age-long habit of mind, to accept this par-
tial and prepared view as a picture of the home life. It
is not.

To know any home really, you must live in it,
" winter and summer " it, know its cellar as well as par-
lour, its daily habits as well as its company manners.
So we have to push into the background not only the

THE HOME

large, generally beautiful home ideal, smiUng conven-
tionally like a big bronze Buddha; but also that little
pocket ideal which we are obliged to use constantly to
keep up the proper mental attitude.

We are not used to looking squarely, open-eyed and
critical, at any home, so ^^ sacred " is the place to us.
Now, having laid aside both the general ideal and the
pocket ideal, what do we see?

As to physical health and comfort and beauty : Ask
your Health Board, your sanitary engineer, how the laws
of health are observed in the average home — even of the
fairly well-to-do, even of the fairly educated. Learn what
we may of art and science, the art of living, the science
of living is not yet known to us. We build for our-
selves elaborate structures in which to live, following
architectural traditions, social traditions, domestic tra-
ditions, quite regardless of the laws of life for the crea-
ture concerned.

This home is the home of a live animal, a large ani-
mal, bigger than a sheep — ^about as big as a fallow deer.
The comfort and health of this animal we seek to insure
by first wrapping it in many thicknesses of cloth and
then shutting it up in a big box, carefully lined with
cloth and paper and occasionally ^^ aired " by opening
windows. We feed the animal in the box, bringing into

PRESENT CONDITIONS

it large and varied supplies of food, and cooking them
there. Growing dissatisfied with the mess resultant
upon this process, disliking the sight and sound and
smell of our own preferred food-processes, yet holding it
essential that they shall all be carried on in the same
box with the animal to be fed ; we proceed to enlarge the
box into many varied chambers, to shut off by closed
doors these offensive details (which we would not do with-
out for the world), and to introduce into the box still
other animals of different grades to perform the offensive
processes.

You thus find in a first-class modem home peculiar
warring conditions, in the adjustment of which health
and comfort are by no means assured. The more ad-
vanced the home and its inhabitants, the more we find
complexity and difficulty, with elements of discomfort
and potential disease, involved in the integral — suppos-
edly integral — processes of the place. The more lining
and stuffing there are, the more waste matter fills the air
and settles continually as dust; the more elaborate the
home, the more labour is required to keep it fit for a
healthy animal to live in ; the more labour required, the
greater the wear and tear on both the heads of the
family.

The conditions of health in a representative modem

THE HOME
home are by no means what we are capable of com-
passing.

We consider ^^ antiseptic cleanliness " as belonging
only to hospitals, and are content to spend our daily,
and nightly, lives in conditions of septic dirt.

An adult human being consumes six hundred cubic
feet of air in an hour. How many homes provide such
an amount, fresh, either by day or night?

Diseases of men may be attributed to exposure, to
wrong conditions in shop and office, to chances of the
crowd, or to special drug habits. Diseases of women and
children must be studied at home, where they take rise.
The present conditions of the home as to health and com-
fort are not satisfactory.

As to beauty : we have not much general knowledge of
beauty, either in instinct or training ; yet, even with such
as we have, how ill satisfied it is in the average home. The
outside of the house is not beautiful; the inside is not
beautiful ; the decorations and furnishings are not beau-
tiful. The home, by itself, in its age-long traditional-
ism, does not allow of growth in these lines ; nor do its
physical limitations permit of it. But as education pro-
gresses and money accumulates we hire " art-decorators "
and try to creep along the line of advance.

A true natural legitimate home beauty is rare indeed.

PRESENT CONDITIONS
We may be perfectiy comfortable among our things,
and even admire them; people of any race or age do
that ; but Chat sense of *^ a beautiful home '' is but
part of the complex ideal, not a fact recognised by
those who love and study beauty and art. We do not
find our common *^ interiors " dear to the soul of the
painter. So we may observe that in general the home
does not meet the demands of the physical nature, for
simple animal health and comfort; nor of the psychical
for true beauty.

Now for our happy family. Let it be carefully borne
in mind that no question is raised as to the happiness of
husband and wife; or of parent and child in their es-
sential relation; but of their happiness as affected by
the home.

The effect of the home, as it now is, upon marriage
is a vitally interesting study. Two people, happily
mated, sympathetic physically and mentally, having
many common interests and aspirations, proceed after
marrying to enter upon the business of ^^ keeping
house," or ^* home-making.'' This business Is not mar-
riage, it is not parentage, it is not child-culture. It is
the running of the commissary and dormitory depart-
ments of life, with elaborate lavatory processes.

The man is now called upon to pay, and pay heavily,

THE HOME
for the maintenance of this group of activities; the
woman to work, either personally, by deputy, or both,
in its performance.

Then follows one of the most conspicuous of condi-
tions in our present home : the friction and waste of its
supposedly integral processes. The man does spend his
life in obtaining the wherewithal to maintain — not a
"little heaven," but a bunch of ill-assorted trades,
wherein everything costs more than it ought to cost, and
nothing is done as it should be done — on a business
basis.

How many men simply hand out a proper sum of
money for " living expenses," and then live, serene and
steady, on that outlay?

Home expenses are large, uncertain, inexplicable. In
some families an exceptional " manager," provided with
with a suitable " allowance," does keep the thing in
comparatively smooth running order, at considerable
cost to herself; but in most families the simple daily
processes of " housekeeping " are a constant source of
annoyance, friction, waste, and loss. Housekeeping, as
a business, is not instructively successful. As the struc-
ture of the home is not what we so readily took for
granted in our easily fitting ideals, so the functions of
the home are not, either. We are really struggling and

PRESENT CONDITIONS

fussing along, trying to live smoothly, healthfully,
peacefully ; studying all manner of " new thought " to
keep us " poised,'* pining for a " simpler life " ; and yet
all spending our strength and patience on the endless
effort to " keep house,'* to " make a home '* — ^to live
comfortably in a way which is not comfortable; and
when this continuous effort produces utter exhaustion,
we have to go away from home for a rest! Think of
that, seriously.

The father is so mercilessly overwhelmed in furnish-
ing the amount of money needed to maintain a home
that he scarce knows what a home is. Time, time to sit
happily down with his family, or to go happily out with
his family, this is denied to the patient toiler on whose
shoulders this ancient structure rests. The mother is
so overwhelmed in her performance or supervision of all
the inner workings of the place that she, too, has scant
time for the real joys of family life.

The home is one thing, the family another ; and when
the home takes all one's time, the family gets little. So
we find both husband and wife overtaxed and worried in
keeping up the institution according to tradition; both
father and mother too much occupied in home-making
to do much toward child-training, man-making!

What is the real condition of the home as regards

THE HOME
children — ^its primal reason for being? How does the
present home meet their needs? How does the home-
bound woman fill the claims of motherhood? As a mat-
ter of fact, are our children happy and prosperous,
healthy and good, at home? Again the ideal rises ; pic-
ture after picture, tender, warm, glowing; again we
must push it aside and look at the case as it is. In our
homes to-day the child grows up — ^when he does not
die — not at all in that state of riotous happiness we are
so eager to assume as the condition of childhood. The
mother loves the child, always and always; she does
what she can, what she knows how; but the principal
work of her day is the care of the house, not of the
child ; the construction of clothes — ^not of character.

Follow the hours in the day of the housewife : count
the minutes spent in the care and service of the child, as
compared with those given to the planning of meak,
the purchase of supplies, the labour either of personally
cleaning things or of seeing that other persons do it ; the
" duties " to society, of the woman exempt from the
actual house-labour.

" But,'* we protest, " all this is for the child — ^the
meals, the well-kept house, the clothes — ^the whole
thing ! '»

Yes? And in what way do the meak we so elabo-

PRESENT CONDITIONS
rately order and prepare, the daintily furnished home,
the much-trimmed clothing, contribute to the body-
growth, mind-grbwth, and soul-growth of the child?
The conditions of home life are not those best suited to
the right growth of children. Infant discipline is one
long struggle to coerce the growing creature into some
sort of submission to the repressions, the exactions, the
arbitrary conventions of the home.

In broad analysis, we find in the representative homes
of to-day a condition of unrest. The man is best able
to support it because he is least in it; he is part and
parcel of the organised industries of the world, he has
his own special business to run on its own lines ; and he«
with his larger life-basis, can better bear the pressure of
house-worries. The wife is cautioned by domestic mor-
alists not to annoy her husband with her little difficul-
ties ; but in the major part of them, the economic diffi-
culties, she must consult him, because he pays the bills.

When a satisfactory Chinaman is running a house-
hold; when the money is paid, the care deputed, the
whole thing done as by clock-work, this phase of home
unrest is removed; but the families so provided for are
few. In most cases the business of running a home is a
source of constant friction and nervous as well as finan-
cial waste.

THE HOME

Quite beyond this business side come the conditions of
home life, the real conditions, as affecting the lives of
the inmates. With great wealth, and a highly cultivated
taste, we find the members of the family lodged in as
much privacy and freedom as possible in a home, and
agreeing to disagree where they are not in accord. With
great love and highly cultivated courtesy and wisdom,
we find the members of the family getting on happily
together, even in a physically restricted home. But in
the average home, occupied by average people, we find
the members of the family jarring upon one another in
varying degree.

That harmony, peace, and love which we attribute to
home life is not as common as our fond belief would
maintain. The husband, as we have seen, finds his chief
base outside, and bears up with greater or less success
against the demands and anxieties of the home. The
wife, more closely bound, breaks down in health with
increasing frequency. The effect of home life on
women seems to be more injurious in proportion to their
social development. Our so-called " society " is one
outlet, though not a healthful one, through which the
woman seeks to find recreation, change, and stimulus to
enable her to bear up against a too continuous home
Ufe.

PRESENT CONDITIONS

The young man at home Is almost a negligible factor
— ^he does not stay in it any more than he can help.
The young woman at home finds her growing indi-
viduality an increasing disadvantage, and many times
makes a too hasty marriage because she is not happy
at home — ^in order to have " a home of her own," where
she still piously believes all will be well.

The child at home has no knowledge of any other and
better environment wherewith to compare this. He ac-
cepts his home as the unavoidable base of all things —
he cannot think of life with a different home. But the
eagerness with which he hails any proposition that takes
him out of it, his passionate hunger for change, for
novelty ; the fever which most boys have for " running
away " ; the eager, intense interest in stories of anything
and everything as far removed from home life as possible ;
the dreary ermui of the child who is punished by being
kept at home — or who has to stay there continuously for
any reason — standing at the window which can give
sight of the world outside and longing for something
to happen — ^all this goes to indicate that home life does
not satisfy the child. There was a time when it did,
when it satisfied every member of the family; but that
was under far more primitive conditions.

The home has not developed in the same ratio as its

THE HOME

the home is the arena for these in large measure. Tender
virtues grow there, too— deep and abiding love, generous
devotion, patient endurance — faithfulness and care ; but
for one home that shows us these is another where domi-
nant injustice, selfishness, unthinking cruelty, impa-
tience, grossest rudeness, a callous disregard for the oft-
trodden feelings of others is found instead. No wide ac-
quaintance with present homes can fail to note these
things in every shade of growth. Home is a place where
people live, people good and bad, great and small, wise
and unwise. The home does not make the bad good, the
small great, or the foolish wise. Many a man who hoi
to be decent in his social life is domineering and selfish at
home. Many a woman who has to be considerate and
polite in her social life, such as it is, is exacting and
greedy at home, and cruel as only the weak and ignorant
can be. Now if the home was what produced the virtues
we commonly attribute to it, then all homes, of all times
and peoples, would have the same effect.

The American man holds pre-eminence as sacrificed to
the home; the American woman as being most petted
and indulged therein. In England we find the man
more the centre of indulgence, in Germany still more
80 — and the women subsidiary to his use and pleasure.

How can ^^ the home " be credited with such opposite

PRESENT CONDITIONS

results? If, as is commonly assumed, the home has any
unfailing general effect, we must be able to point out
that effect in the homes of Russia, China, France, and
Egypt. If we find the homes of the nations differ we
must look for the cause in the national institutions — ^not
the domestic.

That our well-loved homes are as good as they are is
due to our race progress ; to our religion, our education,
our general social advance. When a peasant family
from Hungary comes to America, they establish a Hun-
garian home. As they become Americanised the home
changes and improves. The credit is not due to the
home, but to the country. Meanwhile the home does
have certain definite effects upon our life ; due to its own
nature, and acting upon us in every time rnd place.

These we shall analyse and follow in studying the
effects of the home upon society in a later chapter. In
this observation of present conditions we should note
merely how our average home life now stands. And we
may plainly see these things : a general condition of un-
rest and more or less dissatisfaction. A tendency to ever-
growing expense, which threatens the very existence of
the home and is forcing many into boarding houses. An
increasing difficulty in the industrial processes — a diffi-
culty so great that the lives of our women are embittered

THE HOME

and shortened by it, and the periods of anxiety and ill-
adjustment are longer than those of satisfactory service.
An improvement in sanitary conditions so far as public
measures can reach the home, but a wide field of disease
owing to wrong habits of clothing, eating, and breath-
ing. A rudimentary custom of child-culture only be-
ginning to show signs of progress; and a degree of
unhappiness to which the divorce and criminal courts,
as well as insane asylums and graveyards, bear crushing
testimony.

With conditions of home life as far from our cherished
ideal as these, is it not time for us bravely to face the
problem, and study home life with a view to its improve-
ment? Not " to abolish the home,*' as is wildly feared
by those who dare not discuss it. A pretty testimony
this to their real honour and belief! Is the home so
light a thing as to be blown away by a breath of
criticism? Are we so loosely attached to our homes as
to give them up when some defects are pointed out? Is
it not a confession of the discord and pain we so stoutly
deny, that we are not willing to pour light into this
dark place and see what ails it?

There is no cause for fear. So long as life lasts we
shall have homes ; but we need not always have the same
kind.

PRESENT CONDITIONS

Our present home is injured by the rigidly enforced
maintenance of long-outgrown conditions. We may free
ourselves, if we will, from every one of those injurious,
old conditions, and still retain all that is good and beau-
tiful and right in the home.

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP

/. The Houtemfe

^LL industry began at home.
/ ^ All industry was begun by women.
/ ^ Back of history, at the bottom of civilisation,
during that long period of slowly changing savagery
which antedates our really human life, whatever work was
done on earth was done by the woman in the home. . From
that time to this we have travelled far, spread wide,
grown broad and high; and our line of progress is the
line of industrial evolution.

Where the patient and laborious squaw once carried
on her back the slaughtered game for her own family,
now wind and steam and lightning distribute our pro-
visions around the world. Where she once erected a
rude shelter of boughs or hides for her own family, now
mason and carpenter, steel and iron worker, joiner,
lather, plasterer, glazier, plumber, locksmith, painter,
and decorator combine to house the world. Where she
chewed and scraped the hides, wove bark and grasses,
made garments, made baskets, made pottery, made all

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
that was made for her own family, save the weapons of
slaughter, now the thousand manufactures of a million
mills supply our complex needs and pleasures. AVhere
she tamed and herded a few beasts for her own family,
now from ranchman to packer move the innumerable
flocks and herds of the great plains ; where she ploughed
with a stick and reaped with a knife, for her own f amilyi
now gathered miles of com cross continent and ocean to
feed all nations. Where she prepared the food and
reared the child for her own family — ^what! Has the
world stopped.^ Is history a dream? Is social progress
mere imagination? — there she is yet I Back of history,
at the bottom of civilisation, imtouched by a thousand
whirling centuries, the primitive woman, in the primitive
home, still toils at her primitive tasks.

All industries began at home, there is no doubt of
that. All other industries have left home long ago.
Why have these stayed? All other industries have
grown. Why have not these?

What conditions, social and economic, what shadowy
survival of oldest superstitions, what iron weight of
custom, law, religion, can be adduced in explanation of
such a paradox as this? Talk of Siberian mammoths
handed down in ice, like some crystallised fruit of earliest
ages ! What are they compared with this antedeluvian

THE HOME
relic! By what art, what charm, what miracle, has
the twentieth century preserved (dive the prehistoric
squaw!

This is a phenomenon well worth our study, a subject
teeming with interest, one that concerns every human
being most closely — ^most vitally. Sociology is begin-
ning to teach us something of the processes by which
man has moved up and on to his present grade, and may
move farther. Among those processes none is clearer,
simpler, easier to understand, than industrial evolution.
Its laws are identical with those of physical evolution, a
progression from the less to the greater, from the simple
to the complex, a constant adaptation of means to ends,
a tendency to minimise effort and maximise efficiency.
The solitary savage applies his personal energy to his
personal needs. The social group applies its collective
energy to its collective needs. The savage works by
himself, for himself; the civilised man works in elaborate
inter-dependence with many, for many. By the division
of labour and its increasing specialisation we vastly
multiply skill and power; by the application of ma-
chinery we multiply the output ; by the development of
business methods we reduce expense and increase results;
the whole line of growth is the same as that which makes
a man more efficient in action than his weight in shell-

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
fish. He is more highly organised and specialised. So
is modem industry.

The solitary savage knew neither specialisation nor or-
ganisation — ^he ^^ did his own work." This process gives
the maximum of effort and the minimum of results.
Specialised and organised industry gives the minimum of
effort and the maximum of results. That is civilised
industry.

The so idealised and belauded ^^home industries*'
are still savage. The modem home is built and fur-
nished by civilised methods. Arts, crafts, and manu-
factures, sciences, professions, many highly sublimated
processes of modem life combine to make perfect the
place where we live ; but the industries practised in that
place remain at the first round of the ladder.

Instead of having our pick of the latest and best
workers, we are here confined to the two earliest — ^the
Housewife and the Housemaid. The housewife is the
very first, and she still predominates by so large a ma-
jority as to make us wonder at the noisy prominence of
" the servant question." (It is not so wonderful, after
all, for that class of the population which keeps servants
is the class which makes the most noise. Even in rich
America, even in richest New York, in nine-tenths of the
families the housewife " does her own work." This is

THE HOME
BO large a proportion that we will consider the house*
wife first — ^and fully.

Why was woman the first worker? Because she is a
mother. All living animals are under the law of, first,
self-preservation, and, second, race-preservation. But
the second really comes first; the most imperative forces
in nature compel the individual to sacrifice to the race.
This law finds its best expression in what we call ^^ the
maternal sacrifice." Motherhood means giving. There
is no limit to this urgency. The mother gives all she has
to the young, including life. In many low organisms
the sacrifice is instantaneous and complete — ^the mother
dies in giving birth to the young — ^just lays her eggs
and dies. Such forms of life have to remain low, how-
ever. The defunct mothers can be of no further use to
the young, so they have to be little instinctive automata,
hopelessly arrested in the path of progress.

Nature perceived that this wholly sacrified mother was
not the best kind. Little by little the usefulness of the
mother was prolonged, the brooding mother, the feeding
mother, lastly the nursing mother, highest of all. Order
mammalia stands at the top, type of efficient motherhood.

When human development began, new paths were
open to mother-love — ^new tasks to maternal energy. The
human mother not only nursed and guarded the child,

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
but exercised her dawning ingenuity in adding to its
comfort by making things.

The constructive tendency is essentially feminine ; the
destructive masculine. Male energy tends to scatter and
destroy, female to gather and construct. So human
labour comes by nature from the woman, was hers entirely
for countless ages, while the man could only hunt and
fight, or prance and prophesy as ^^ medicine man '' ; and
this is still so in those races which remain savage. Even
in so advanced a savage race as the Zulus, the women do
the work; and our own country has plenty of similar
examples near at hand.

As human civilisation is entirely dependent on pro-
gressive industry, while hunting and fighting are facul-
ties we share with the whole carnivora, it is easy to see
that during all those ages of savagery the woman was
the leader. She represented the higher grade of life;
and carried it far enough to bring to birth many of the
great arts as well as the humbler ones, especially the in-
valuable art of language.*

But maternal energy has its limits. What those limits
are may be best studied in an ant's nest or a beehive.
These marvellous insects, perfected types of industry and
of maternity, have succeeded in organising motherhood.

•See Otis Mason, " Woman^s Share in Primitive Culture."

THE HOME
Most creatures reproduce individually, these collectively
— all personal life absolutely lost in the group life.
Moved by an instinct coincident with its existence, the
new-hatched ant, still weak and wet from the pupa, stag-
gers to the nearest yet unborn to care for it, and cares
for it devotedly to the end of life.

One bee group-mother, crawling from cell to cell, lays
eggs unnumbered for the common care ; the other group-
mothers, their own egg-laying capacity in abeyance,
labour unceasingly in iihe interests of those cemmon eggs ;
and the delicate perfection of provision and service thus
attained results in — ^what? In a marvellous motherhood
and a futile fatherhood ; the predominant female, the al-
most negligible male— a temporary f ertiUsing agent
merely ; in infinite reproduction, and that is all ; in more
bees, and more ants, more and more for ever, like the
sands of the sea. They would cover the earth like a
blanket but for merciful appetites of other creatures.
But this is only multiplication — not improvement. Na-
ture has one more law to govern life besides self-pres-
ervation and reproduction — ^progress. To be, to re-be,
and to be better is the law. It is not enough to keep
one's self alive, it is not enough to keep one's kind alive,
we must improve. This law of growth, which is the
grand underlying one that moves the universe, acts on

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
liying species mainly through the male. He is progres-
sive where the female is conservative by nature. He is
a variant where she is the race type. This tendency to
vary is one of the most beneficent in nature. Through it
comes change, and, through change, improvement. The
unbridled flow of maternal energy is capable of produc-
ing an exquisite apparatus for child-rearing, and no
more. The masculine energy is needed also, for the
highest evolution.

Well is it for the human race that the male savage
finally took hold of the female's industry. Whether he
perceived her superiority and sought to emulate it is
doubtful ; more probably it was the pressure of economic
conditions which slowly forced him to it. The glaring
proofs of time taught him that the pasture was more
profitable than the hunting ground, and the cornfield
than the pasture. The accumulating riches produced by
the woman's industry drew him on. Slowly, reluctantly,
the lordly fighter condescended to follow the humble
worker, who led him by thousands of years. In the
hands of the male, industry developed. The woman is a
patient, submissive, inexhaustible labourer. The pour-
ing forces of maternity prompt her to work for ever —
for her young. Not so the man. Working is with him
an acquired habit, and acquired very late in his racial

THE HOME

Kfe. The low-grade man still in his heart despises it,
he still prefers to be waited on by women, he still feels
most at home in hunting and fighting. And man alone
being represented in the main fields of modem industry,
this male instinct for hunting and fighting plays havoc
with the true economic processes. He makes a warfare
of business, he makes prey of his competitors, he still
seeks to enslave — ^to make others work for him, instead of
freely and joyously working all he can. The best indus-
trial progress needs both elements — ours is but a com-
promise as yet, something between the beehive and the
battlefield.

But, with all the faults of unbridled male energy, it
has lifted industry from the limits of the home to that of
the world. Through it has come our splendid growth;
much marred by evils of force and fraud, crude, wasteful,
cruel, but progressive ; and infinitely beyond the level of
these neglected rudimentary trades left at home; left
to the too tender mercies of the housewife.

The iron limits of her efficiency are these: First, that
of average capacity. Just consider what any human
business would be in which there was no faintest possibil-
ity of choice, of exceptional ability, of division of labor.
What would shoes be like if every man made his own, if
the shoemaker had never come to his development? What

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP

would houses be like if every man made his own? Or
hats, or books, or waggons? To confine any industry to
the level of a universal average is to strangle it in its
cradle. And there, for ever, lie the industries of the
housewife. What every man does alone for himself, no
man can ever do well — or woman either. That is the
first limit of the " housewife.*'

The next is the maternal character of this poor pri-
meval labourer. Because of her wealth of power and pa-
tience it does not occur to her to make things easier for
herself. The fatal inertia of home industries lies in their
maternal basis. The work is only done for the family —
the family is satisfied — ^what remains? There is no other
ambition, no other incentive, no other reward. Where
the horizon of duty and aspiration closes down with
one's immediate blood relations, there is no room for
growth.

All that has pushed and pulled reluctant man up the
long path of social evolution has not touched the home-
bound woman. Whatever height he reached, her place
was still the same. The economic relation of the sexes
here works* with tremendous force. Depending on the
male for her economic profit, her own household labours
kept to the sex-basis, and never allowed to enter the open
* See " Women and Economics/' C. P. Stetson.

THE HOME

market, there was nothing to modify her original sex-
tendency to work with stationary contentment. If we
can imagine for a moment a world like ours, with all our
elaborate business processes in the hands of women, and
the men still in the position of the male savage — ^painted
braves, ready for the warpath, and good for little else —
we get a comparison with this real condition, where the
business processes are in the hands of men, and the
women still in the position of the female savage — docile
toilers for the family, and good for little else. That is the
second limit of the housewife — ^that she is merely work-
ing for her own family — ^in the sex-relation — ^not the
economic relation; as servant to the family instead of
servant to the world.

Next comes her isolation. Even the bottom-level of a
universal average — even the blind patience of a work-
ing mother — could be helped up a little under the benef-
icent influence of association. In the days when the in-
genious squaw led the world, she had it. The women
toiled together at their primitive tasks and talked to-
gether as they toiled. The women who founded the be-
ginnings of agriculture were founders also of the vil-
lage; and their feminine constructive tendencies held it
together while the destructive tendencies of the belliger-
ent male continually tore it apart. All through that

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
babyhood of civilisation, the hunting and fighting in-
stinct made men prey upon the accumulated wealth re-
sultant from the labouring instinct of women — ^but in-
dustry conquered, being the best. As industry devel-
oped, as riches increased, as property rights were defined,
as religions grew, women were confined more and more
closely at home. Later civilisations have let them out to
play — ^but not to work. The parasitic female of the
upper classes is allowed the empty freedom of associa-
tion with her useless kind; but the housewife is still
confined to the house.

We are now giving great attention to this matter of
home industry. We are founding chairs of Household
Science, we are writing books on Domestic Economics;
we are striving mightily to elevate the standard of home
industry — and we omit to notice that it is just be-
cause it is home industry that all this trouble is neces-
sary.

So far as home industry had been affected by world
industry, it has improved. The implements of cooking
and cleaning, for instance — ^where should we be if our
modem squaw had to make her own utensils, as did her
ancient prototype? The man, in world industry,
makes not only the house, with all its elaborate labour-
saving and health-protecting devices ; not only the f umi-

THE HOME

ture of the house, the ornaments, hangings, and decora-
tions, but the implements of the home industries as well.
Go to the household furnishing store of our day — ^remem-
ber the one pot of the savage family to boil the meat and
wash the baby — and see the difference between ** home-
made '* and " world-made " things.

So far as home industry has progressed, it is through
contact with the moving world outside; so far as it re-
mains undeveloped, it is through the inexorable limita-
tions of the home in itself.

There is one more limitation to be considered — the
number of occupations practised. Though man has taken
out and developed all the great trades, and, indeed, all
trades beyond a certain grade, he has left the roots of
quite a number at home. The housewife practises the
conflicting elements of many kinds of work. First, she
is cook. Whatever else is done or undone, we must
eat; and since eating is ordained to be done at home,
that is her predominant trade. The preparation and
service of food is a most useful function ; and as a world-
industry, in the hands of professionals, students, and ex-
perts, it has reached a comparatively high stage of de-
velopment.

In the nine-tenths of our homes where the housewife
is cook, it comes under all these limitations : First, aver-

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
age capacity; second, sex-tendency; third, isolation;
fourth, conflicting duties.

The cook, having also the cleaning to do, the sewing,
mending, nursing, and care of children, the amount of
time given to cooking is perforce limited. But even the
plainest of home cooking must take up a good propor-
tion of the day. The cooking, service, and ^^ cleaning
up " of ordinary meals, in a farmhouse, with the con-
tributary processes of picking, sorting, peeling, wash-
ing, etc., and the extra time given to special baking,
pickling, and preserving, take fully six hours a day. To
the man, who is out of the house during work-hours, and
who seldom estimates woman's work at its real value, this
may seem extreme, but the working housewife knows it is
a fair allowance, even a modest one.

There are degrees of speed, skill, intelligence, and pur-
chasing power, of course ; but this is a modest average ;
two hours for breakfast, three for dinner, one for supper.
The preparation of food as a household industry takes
op half the working time of half the population of the
world. This utterly undeveloped industry, inadequate
and exhausting, takes nearly a quarter of a twelve-hour
day of the world's working force.

Cooking and sewing are inimical; the sewing of
the housewife is quite generally pushed over into the

.95

THE HOME

evening as well as afternoon, thus lengthening her day
considerably. Nursing, as applied to the sick, must
come in when it happens, other things giving way at that
time. Cleaning is continuous. Cooking, of course,
makes cleaning; the two main elements of dirt in the
household being grease and ashes; another, and omni-
present one, dust. Then, there are the children to clean,
and the clothes to clean — this latter so considerable an
item as to take two days of extra labour — during which,
of course, other departments must be less attended.

We have the regular daily labour'of serving meals and
** clearing up," we have the regular daily labour of
keeping the home in order; then we have the washing
day, ironing day, baking day, and sweeping day.
Some make a special mending day also. This division,
best obsen^ed by the most competent, is a heroic monu-
ment to the undying efforts of the human worker to
specialise. But we have left out one, and the most im-
portant one, of our home industries— the care of chU-
dren.

Where is Children's Day?

The children are there every day, of course. Yes,
but which hour of the day? With six for food, with —
spreading out the washing and ironing over the week —
two for laundry, with — spreading the sweeping day and

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP

adding the daily dusting and setting to rights — two for
deaning ; and another two for sewing — after these twelve
hours of necessary labour are accounted for, what time
remains for the children?

The initial purpose of the home is the care of children.
The initial purpose of motherhood is the care of chil-
dren. How are the duties of the mother compatible with
the duties of the housewife? How can child-culture, as
a branch of human progress, rise to any degree of
proficiency in this swarming heap of rudimentary
trades?

Nothing is asked — ^here — ^as to how the housewife,
doing all these things together her life long, can herself
find time for culture and development; or how can she
catch any glimmer of civic duty or public service beyond
this towering pile of domestic duty and household service.
The particular point herein advanced is that the condi-
tions of home industry m such forever limit the growth
of the industry so practised ; forever limit the growth of
the persons so practising them ; and also tend to limit the
growth of the society which is content to leave any of its
essential functions in this distorted state.

Our efforts to " lift the standard of household indus-
try ** ignore the laws of industry. We seek by talking
and writing, by poetising and sermonising, and playing

THE HOME

on every tender sentiment and devout aspiration, to con-
vince the housewife that there is something particularly
exalted and beautiful, as well as useful, in her occupa^
tion. This shows our deep-rooted error of sex-distinc<
tion in industry. We consider the work of the woman
in the house as essentially feminine, and fail to see that,
as work, it is exactly like any other kind of human ac-
tivity, having the same limitations and the same possi-
bilities.

Suppose we change the sex and consider for a while the
status of a house-husband. He could be a tall, strong,
fine-looking person — man-servants often are. He could
love his wife and his children — ^industrial status does not
affect these primal instincts. He could toil from morn-
ing to night, manfuUy, to meet their needs.

Suppose we are visiting in such a family. We should
find a very rude small hut — no one man could build much
of a house, but, ah ! the tender love, the pride, the inti-
mate emotion he would put into that hut ! For his heart's
dearest — for his precious little ones — ^he had dragged
together the fallen logs — chipped them smooth with his
flint-ax (there could have been no metal work while
every man was a house-husband), and piled them to-
gether. With patient, loving hands he had daubed the
chinks with clay, made beds of leaves, hung hides upon

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
the walls. Even some rude stools he might have con<*
trived — ^though furniture really belongs to a later
period. But over all comes the incessant demand for
food. His cherished family must eat, often and
often, and under that imperative necessity all others
wait.

So he goes forth to the hunt, brave, subtle, fiercely
ingenious; and, actuated by his ceaseless love for his
family he performs wonders. He brings home the food
— day after day — even sometimes enough for several
days, though meat does not keep very long. The family
would have food of a sort, shelter of a sort, and love. But
try to point out to the house-husband what other things
he could obtain for them, create for them, provide for
them, if he learned to combine with other men, to ex-
change labour, to organise industry. See his virtuous
horror!

What ! Give up his duty to his family ! Let another
man hunt for them! — ^another man build their home —
another man make their garments ! He will not hear of
it. ** It is my duty as a husband," he will tell you, " to
serve my wife. It is my duty as a father to serve my
children. No other person could love them as I do, and
without that love the work would not be done as well."
Strong in this conviction, the house^

^ '^SOCltTX U^'?.^^^

\ \

^«^

THE HOME

main intrenched in his home, serving his family with
might and main, having no time, no strength, no brain
capacity for undertaking larger methods; and there he
and his family would all be, immovable in the Stone
Age.

Never was any such idiot on earth as this hypothetical
home-husband. It was not in him to stay in such primi-
tive restrictions. But he has been quite willing to leave
his wife in that interestingly remote period.

The permanent error of the housewife lies in that as-
sumption that her love for her family makes her service
satisfactory. Family affection has nothing to do with
the specialist's skill ; nor with the specialist's love of his
work for the pleasure of doing it. That is the kind of
love that makes good work ; and that is the kind of work
the world needs and the families within it. Men, special-
ised, give to their families all that we know of modem
comforts, of scientific appliances, of works of art, of the
complex necessities and conveniences of modem life.
Women, unspecialised, refuse to benefit their families in
like proportion ; but offer to them only the grade of serv-
ice which was proper enough in the Stone Age, but is a
historic disgrace to-day.

A house does not need a wife any more than it does a
husband. Are we never to have a man-wife? A really

100

LESLIE WOMAH SUFFRABt tOtt>k\^^«^

%.»

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP

suitable and profitable companion for a man instead of
the bond-slave of a house? There is nothing in the
work of a house which requires marital or maternal
affection. It does require highly developed skill and
business sense — ^but these it fails to get.

Would any amount of love on the part of that incon-
ceivable house-husband justify him in depriving his
family of all the fruits of progress? What a colossal
charge of malfeasance in office could be brought against
such a husband — such a father ; who, under the name of
love, should so fail in his great first duty — ^Progress.

How does the woman escape this charge? Why is not
she responsible for progress, too? By that strange as-
sumption does she justify this refusal to keep step with
the world? She will tell you, perhaps, that she cannot
do more than she does — she has neither time nor strength
nor ambition for any more work. So might the house-
husband have defended himself — as honestly and as rea-
sonably. It is true. While every man had to spend all
his time providing for his own family, no man ever had,
or ever could have, time, strength, or ambition to do
more.

It is not more work that is asked of women, but less.
It is a different method of work. Human progress rests
upon the interchange of labour ; upon work done hiunanly

101

THE HOME

for each other, not, like the efforts of the savage or the
brute, done only for one's own. The housewife, blinded
by her ancient duty, fails in her modem duty.

It is true that, while she does this work in this way,
she can do no more. Therefore she must stop doing it,
and learn to do differently. The house will not be
" neglected " by her so doing ; but is even now most
shamefully neglected by her antique methods of labour.
The family will not be less loved because it has a skilled
worker to love it. Love has to pass muster in results, as
well as intentions. Here are five mothers, equally lov-
ing. One is a Hottentot. One is an Eskimo. One is a
Hindoo. One is a German peasant woman« One is an
American and a successful physician.

Which could do most for her children? All might
compete on even terms if " love is enough,'* as poets have
claimed ; but which could best provide for her chUdrenf

Neither overflowing heart nor overburdened hand suf-
ficiently counts in the uplifting of the race ; that rests on
what is done. The position of the housewife is a final
limitation and a continuous, increasing injury both to the
specific industries of the place, and to her first great
duty of motherhood. The human race, fathered only
by house-husbands, would never have moved at all. The
human race, mothered only by housewives, has moved

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
only half as fast and as far as it rightly should have
done, and the work the patient housewife spends her life
on is pitifully behind in the march of events. The home
as a workshop is utterly insufficient to rightly serve the
needs of the growing world.

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP

//. The Housemaid

jL M0N6 that tenth part of the population suf-
/ ^k ficiently rich to keep servants, the conditions
/ ^^ of domestic industry are familiar to us. This
is the tenth which is most conscious, and most vocal. It
has the widest range of social contact ; it is most in touch
with Hterature ; both in speech and writing we hear of ten-
est from the small class who keep servants.

The woman who does her own work is not usually a
writer and has little time for reading. Moreover,' her
difficulties, though great, are not of the sort that con-
found the mistress of servants. The housewife is held
to her work by duty and by love ; also by necessity. She
cannot " better herself " by leaving ; and indeed, without
grave loss and pain, she cannot leave at all. So the
housewife struggles on, too busy to complain; and ac-
complishes, under this threefold bond of duty, love, and
necessity far more than can be expected of a com-
paratively free agent.

104

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
Therefore we hear little of the " problem '* of domestic
service where the wife is the servant; and have to draw
our conclusions from such data as the large percentage
of farmers' wives who become insane, and such generalisa*
tions as those of the preceding chapter. But the " Serv-
ant Question " is clearly before us. It is an economic
problem which presses upon us all, (that tenth of us all
which is so prominent that it tacitly assumes its problem
to be universal;) and the pressure of which increases
daily. We are even beginning to study it scientifically.
Miss Salmon's valuable book on " Domestic Service "
contributes much useful information. The Household
Economic Association exists largely to alleviate the dis-
tresses of this system of industry. Scarce one women
(of this tenth) but feels the pinch of our imperfect
method of doing housework, and as they become better
educated and more intelligent, as some of them even learn
something of more advanced economic processes, this
crude, expensive, and inadequate system causes more and
more uneasiness and distress.

What is the status of household industry as practised
by servants? It is this: The Housewife having become
the Lady of the House, and the work still having to be
done in the house, others must be induced to do it. In
the period from which this custom dates it was a simple

105

THE HOME

matter of elevating ** the wife or chief wife " • to a posi-
tion of dominance, and leaving the work to be done by
the rest of the women. Domestic service, as an industrial
stakis, dates from the period of the polygynous group ;
the household with the male head and the group of serv-
ing women; from the time when wives were slaves and
slaves were wives, indiscriminately. (See domestic re-
lations of Jacob. )

The genesis of the relation being thus established, it is
easy to account for its present peculiar and dominating
condition — celibacy. The housemaid is the modem
derivative from the slave-wife. She may no longer be
the sub-wife of the master — but neither may she be
another man's wife.

No married man wishes his wife to serve another man.
This household service, being esteemed as a distinctly
feminine function, closely involved with maternity, or at
least with marriage, or, if not with marriage, at the
very least with woman's devotion, and quite inconsistent
with any other marriage; therefore we find the labours
of the household performed by celibate women of a lower
class. Our modem household is but a variation of the
primitive group — ^the man and his serving women still.

In the period of slave labour, where both men and
♦See Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class.**

106

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
wcMnen were owned and exploited, we find household
labour performed by men ; and in those Oriental nations
where slavery yet exists we find man-service common in
the home. Also in nations still influenced by feudalism,
where service once went with the soil, where the lord is
still attended by what was originally his contingent of
fighting men, but which has gradually dwindled to an
array of footmen and butlers; there we find men still
contented, or partially contented, to do house-service.
But it ranks last and lowest in man's mind, and justly.
As fast as industrial evolution progresses we find men
less and less content to do this work in this way ; or, for
that matter, women either.

In the highly advanced economic status of America we
are especially confronted with this difficulty, and have
to supply our needs from nations still largely under the
influence of the feudal regime, or those in the yet lower
period of slavery. Men-servants, when obtained, are
generally satisfactory; no public outcry is made over
them. It is the " servant-girl " that constitutes the
element of difficulty, and it is she that we must con-
sider.

Let it be clearly held in mind that the very first
economic relation was that of sex, based on the natural
tendency of the female to work ; sex-labour. The second

107

THE HOME

stage of economic relation is that of force ; slave-labour.
The next is that of payment, what we call the contract
system ; wage-labour.

Social evolution still shows us all these forms actively
present in this age, though belonging to such remote and
different ones; just as physical evolution still shows us
monad and mollusk as well as vertebrate mammals.
Each stage has its use and value. But when an early
stage comes into contact with a later one there is
trouble.

We have all seen how inevitably a savage status recedes
and disappears before the civilised. Individual savages
may be assimilated by the civilised competing race; but
savagery and civilisation cannot coexist when they come
in contact and competition. A savage cult may endure
on an island in the South Seas, but not in England or
America. So an early status of labour has to give way
to a later; as shown so conspicuously in the last great
historic instance in our own country.

Household industry is a mixed status, composed mainly
of sex-labour, the first stage; and partially of slave-
labour, the second. This slave-labour is in the act of
changing to contract labour ; and, as such, cannot endure
the conditions of home industry. The housewife has to,
the house-slave had to, the house-servant mostly had to ;

108

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
but the honse-^mployee does not have to, and will not if
she can help it.

The contract status of labour is incompatible with
home industry. Note how the condition of celibacy in-
tereacts upon the relation. We expect of our house-
servants that they be " attached," " loyal,'' " faithful,"
** respectful," " devoted " ; we do not say they always
are, but that is our ideal; these are the qualities for
which we most praise them. Attachment is especially
valued. If only we could still own them! Then there
would be that pleasant sense of permanence and security
so painfully lacking in our modern house-service. Short
of owning them we seek by various futile methods to
** attach " them. Some societies give medals for long
service. The best thing we can say of a servant is ^^ she
stayed with me for seven years ! " or whatever period we
can boast. Now we do not seek to ^^ attach " our butcher
or baker or candlestick-maker; why our cook? Because
this status of celibacy has necessarily resulted in the most
piunful conditions of transient incapacity in house-
service.

People must marry. People ought to marry. People
will marry, whether we say yes or no. Why should the
housemaid stay a maid for our sakes? What do we
offer in the exciting prospect of always doing the same

109

THE HOME

work for the same wages, compared to the prospect of
doing the same work» without wages, it is true, but with
a ** mechanic's lien *' on her husband's purse? Or what
would any scale of wages or promotion Be against the
joys of a home of her own, a husband of her own, chil-
dren of her own?

We, intrenched in our own homes and families, think
she ought to be satisfied with serving our husbands and
children, but she is not — ^and never will be. There is
of course a certain percentage of old maids and widows,
sufficiently disagreeable not to be wanted by their rela-
tives, or sufficiently independent not to want them;
sufficiently capable to hold a place as house-servant, but
not sufficiently capable to follow any other trade; or,
in last possibility, there is here and there that Blessed
Damosel of our domestic dreams — ^a strong, capable,
ingenious woman, not hampered by any personal ties or
affections ; not choosing to marry ; preferring to work
in a kitchen to working in a shop ; and so impressed by
the august virtues and supreme importance of our family
that she becomes " attached " to it for life. These
cases are, however, rare. In the vast majority of house-
holds the maid is a maid, a young woman of the lower
classes, doing this work because she can do no other,
and doing it only until she marries. The resultant con-

110

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
ditions of the industry so practised are precisely what
we might expect.

This young woman is in no way attached to the
family. A family is connected by the ties of sex» by
marriage and heredity, with occasional cases of adoption.
If the servant is not a relative, or adopted, she does not
belong to the family. She has left her father's family,
and looks forward to her husband's, meanwhile as an aid
to the first or a means to the latter, she serves ours.
She is of the lower classes because no others will do this
work. She is ignorant because, if she were intelligent,
she would not do it — does not do it; the well-schooled,
well-trained young woman much prefers other work. So
we find household industry in that tenth of our homes
not served by the housewife, is in the hands of ignorant
and inferior young women, under conditions of constant
change.

The position of the lady of the house, as this pro-
cession of untrained, half -trained, ill-trained, or at least
othemnse-trained young women march through her
domain, is like that of the sergeant of companies of raw
recruits. She " lifts 'em — ^lif ts 'em — lifts 'em " — but
there is never any " charge that wins the day."

Household industry we must constantly remember
never rises to the level of a regular trade. It is service —

111

THE HOME

not ** skilled labour.'* What is done there is done under
no broad light of public improvement, but is merely
catering to the personal tastes and habits, whims and
fancies of one family. The lady of the house is by
no means a captain of industry. She is not a trainer
and governor of able subordinates, like the mate of a ship
or the manager of a hotel. Her position is not one of
power, but of helplessness. She has to be done for and
waited on. Whatever maternal instinct may achieve at
first hand in the woman-who-does-her-own-work, it does
not make competent instructors. When the lady of the
house's husband gets rich enough she hires a house-
keeper to engage, discharge, train, and manage the
housemaids.

Here and there we do find an efficient lady of the
house who can do wonders even with this stream of
transient incapacity, but the prominence of the servant-
question proves her rarity. If all ladies of houses
could bring order out of such chaos, could meet con-
stant needs by transient means, the subtleties of re-
fined tastes by the inefficiencies of unskilled labour, then
nothing more need be said. But the thing cannot be
done. The average house-mistress is not a servant-
charmer and the average housemaid is necessarily inr
capable. This is what should be squarely faced and ac-

112

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
knowledged. The kind of work that needs to be done to
keep a modem home healthy, comfortable, and refined,
cannot be done — can never be done — ^by this office-boy
grade of labour. Because home industry is home in-
dustry, because it has been left aborted in the darkness of
private life while other industries have grown so broad
and high in the light of public life, we have utterly
failed to recognise its true value.

These industries, so long neglected and misused, are of
supreme importance. The two main ones — ^the prepara-
tion of food and the care of children — can hardly be over-
estimated in value to the race. On the one the health of
the world mainly depends, yes, its very life. On the
other the progress of the world depends, and that is more
than life. That these two great social functions should
be left contentedly to the hands of absolutely the lowest
grade of labour in our civilisation is astounding. It is
the lowest grade of labour not because it is performed
by the lowest class of labour — ^humanity can grow to
splendid heights from that beginning, and does so every
day ; but it is the lowest because it is carried on in the
home.

The conditions of home industry as practised by either
housewife or housemaid are hopelessly restrictive.
They are, as we have seen, the low standard of average

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THE HOME
capacity ; the element of sex tendency ; the isolation and
the unspecialised nature of the work. In two of these
conditions the housemaid gains on the housewife. She
is partly out of the sex-tendency status and partly into
the contract relation ; hence the patient, submissive, con-
servative influence is lightened. In families of greater
affluence there is some specialisation; we have varieties
in housemaid; cookmaid, scuUerymaid, nursemaid,
chambermaid, parlourmaid, lady'smaid — ^as many as
we can afford ; and in such families we find such elevation
of home-industry as is possible; marred, however, by
serious limitations.

Household industry is a world question ; and in no way
to be answered by a solution only possible of application
to one family in a thousand. It is a question of our
time and the future, and not met by a solution which
consists in maintaining an elaborate archaism. The
proper feeding of the world to-day is no more to be
guaranteed by one millionaire's French cook, than was
the health of the Roman world by one patrician's Greek
doctor.

Human needs, in remote low stages of social develop-
ment, were met by privately owned labourers. As late
as the Middle Ages the great lord had in his menie every
kind of functionary to minister to his wants ; not only his

114

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
private servants of the modem kind, with butlers and
sutlers and pantlers in every degree; but his armourer,
his tailor, his minstrel, and his fool.

The feudal lord kept a fool to amuse him, whereas
we go to the theatre. He kept a cook to feed him — and
we do it yet. He kept a poet to celebrate his deeds and
touch his emotions. We have made poetry the highest
class in literature, and literature the world's widest art— «
by setting the poet free.

To work for the world at large is necessary to the
development of the work. A private poet is necessarily
ignoble. So is a private cook. The iron limitations of
household service are immutable — world service has
none. To cater to the whims of one master lowers both
parties concerned. To study the needs of humanity and
minister to them is the line of social progress.

There is nothing private and special in the preparation
of food ; a more general human necessity does not exist.
There must be freedom and personal choice in the food
prepared, but it no more has to be cooked for you than
the books you love best have to be written for you. We
flatter ourselves that we get what we want by having
it done at home. Apply that condition to any other kind
of hiunan product and see if it holds. We get what we
want by free choice from the world's markets — ^not from

115

THE HOME

a workshop in the back yard. Imagine the grade of
production, the arts, crafts, and manufactures, that we
should have to select from, if we tried to have all things
made for us by private servants ! Apply the intelligence
and skill of this zoetrope procession of housemaids to
watch-making or shoe-making, or umbrella-making, or
the making of paper, or glass, or steel, or any civilised
commodity ; and if we can easily see how immeasurably
incompetent these flitting handmaids would be for any
of these lines of work, why do we imagine them competent
to prepare food and take care of children? Because we
have never thought of it at all.

Men are too busy doing other things, too blinded by
their scorn for ** women's work." Women are too busy
doing these things to think about them at all ; or if they
think, stung by the pain of pressing inconvenience, they
only think personally, they only feel it for themselves,
each one blindly buried in her own home, like the crafty
ostrich with his head in the sand.

The question is a public one ; none could be more so.
It affects in one of its two branches every human being
except those who board ; every home, without exception.
Perhaps some impression may be made on the blank
spaces of our untouched minds by exhibiting the
economic status of home industry.

116

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
We Americans are credited with acuteness and good
business sense. How can we reconcile ourselves to the
continuance of a system not only so shamefully inade-
quate, but so ruinously expensive? If we are not morti-
fied to find that our boasted industrial progress carries
embedded in its very centre this stronghold of hoary an-
tiquity, this knotted, ertimipy bunch of amputated rudi-
ments ; if we are not moved by the low. standard of
general health as affected by food, and the no standard
of general education as affecting the baby, perhaps we
can be stimulated somewhat by the consideration of

The performance of domestic industries involves, first,
an enormous waste of labour. The fact that in nine cases
out of ten this labour is unpaid does not alter its waste-
fulness. If half the men in the world stayed at home to
wait on the other half, the loss in productive labour would
be that between half and the fraction required to do the
work under advanced conditions, say one-twentieth. Any
group of men requiring to be cooked for, as a ship's crew^
a lumber camp, a company of soldiers, have a proportion-
ate number of cooks. To give each man a private cook
would reduce the working strength materially. Our
private cooks being women makes no difference in the
economic law. We are so accustomed to rate women's

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THE HOME
labour on a sex-basis, as being her ** duty " and not
justly commanding any return, that we have quite over-
looked this tremendous loss of productive labour.

Then there is the waste of endless repetition of
** plant.** We pay rent for twenty kitchens where one
kitchen would do. All that part of our houses which is
devoted to these industries, kitchen, pantry, laundry,
servants' rooms,etc.,could be eliminated from the expense
account by the transference of the labour involved to a
suitable workshop. Not only our rent bills, but our
furnishing bills, feel the weight of this expense. We
have to pay severally for all these stoves and dishes, tools
and utensils, which, if properly supplied in one proper
place instead of twenty, would cost far less to begin
with; and, in the hands of skilled professionals, would
not be under the tremendous charge for breakage and
ruinous misuse which now weighs heavily on the house-
holder. Then there is the waste in fuel for these nine-
teen unnecessary kitchens, and lastly and largest of any
item except labour, the waste in food.

First the waste in purchasing in the smallest retail
quantities ; then the waste involved in separate catering,
the " left overs " which the ingenious housewife spends
her life in trying to ** use up " ; and also the waste
caused by carelessness and ignorance in a great majority

118

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
of cases. Perhaps this last element, careless igno-
rance, ought to cover both waste and breakage, and be
counted by itself, or as a large item in the labour ac-
count.

Count as you will, there could hardly be devised a more
wasteful way of doing necessary work than this domestic
way. It costs on the most modest computation three
times what it need cost. Once properly aroused to a
consideration of these facts it will be strange indeed if
America's business sense cannot work out some system of
meeting these common human necessities more effectually
and more economically.

The housemaid would be more of a step in advance if
the housewife, released from her former duties, then
entered the ranks of productive labour, paid her sub-
stitute, and contributed something further to the world's
wealth. But nothing could be farther from the thoughts
of the Lady of the House. Her husband being able to
keep more than one woman to do the work of the house ;
and much preferring to exhibit an idle wife, as proof of
his financial position,* the idle wife proceeds so to con-
duct her house as to add to its labours most considerably.
The housewife's system of housekeeping is perforce
limited to her own powers. The size of the home, the

* See Veblen again.

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THE HOME
Bature of its furnishings and deGorations, the kind of
dothes worn by the women and children, the amount of
food served and the manner of its service ; all these are
regulated by the housewife's capacity for labour. But
once the housemaid enters the field of domestic labour
there is a scale of increase in that labour which has no
limits but the paying capacity of the man.

This element of waste cannot be measured, because it
is a progressive tendency, it ^^ grows by what it feeds
upon** (as most things do, by the way!) and waxes
greater and greater with each turn of the wheel. If the
lady of the house, with one servant, were content to
live exactly as she did before; keeping the work within
the powers of the deputy, she would be simply and ab-
solutely idle, and that is a very wearing condition;
especially to woman, the bom worker. So the lady of
the house, mingling with other ladies of houses, none
of them having anything but houses to play with, pro-
ceeds so to furnish, decorate, and arrange those houses,
and so to elaborate the functions thereof, as to call
for more and ever more housemaids to do the endless
work.

This open door of senseless extravagance hinges
directly upon the idle wife. She leaves her position of
domestic service, not to take a higher one in world service ;

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THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
bat to depute her own work to an inferior and do none
at all.

Thus we find that in the grade of household labour
done by the housewife we have all those elements of
incapacity and waste before explained; and that in the
grade done by the housemaid we have a decrease in
ability, a measurable increase in direct waste, and an
immeasurable increase in the constantly rising sum of
waste due to these bloated buildings stuffed with a
thousand superfluities wherein the priceless energies of
women are poured out in endless foolishness ; in work that
meets no real need; and in play that neither rests nor
refreshes.

So far our sufferings under the present rapid elimina-
tion of the housemaid have taught us little. Our princi-
pal idea of bettering the condition is by training ser-
vants. We seriously propose to establish schools to train
these reluctant young women to our service ; even in some
cases to pay them for going there. This is indeed
necessary ; for why should they pay for tuition, or even
waste time in gratuitously studying, when they can get
wages without?

We do not, and cannot, offer such graded and pro-
gressive salaries as shall tempt really high-class labour
into this field. Skilled labour and domestic service are

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THE HOME

incompatible. The degree of intelligence, talent, learn-
ing, and trained skill which should be devoted to feeding
and cleaning the human race will never consent to domes-
tic service. It is the grade of work which forever limits
its development, the place, the form of service. So long
as the home is the workshop the housewife cannot, and
the housemaid will not, even if she could, properly do
this work for the neglected world.

Is it not time that the home be freed from these in-
dustries so palpably out of place? That the expense of
living be decreased by two-thirds and the productive
labour increased by nine-twentieths? That our women
cease to be an almost universal class of house-servants ;
plus a small class of parasitic idlers and greedy con-
sumers of wealth? That the preparation of food be
raised from its present condition of inadequacy, injury,
and waste to such a professional and scientific position
that we may learn to spare from our street comers both
the drug-store and the saloon? That the care of chil-
dren become at last what it should be — ^the noblest and
most valuable profession, to the endless profit of our
little ones and progress of the race? And that our
homes, no longer greasy, dusty workshops, but centres
of rest and peace; no longer gorgeous places of enter-
tainment that does not entertain, but quiet places of hap-

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THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
piness; no longer costing the laborious lives of over-
worked women or supporting the useless lives of idle
ones, but properly maintained by organised industries;
beocnne ^n^^^j^ by men and women alike, both glad and
honourable worke^rs-iQ an easy world?

128

HOME-COOKING

WE are all reared in a traditional belief that
what we get to eat at home is, by virtue of
that location, better than what we get to
eat anywhere else. The expression, "home-cooking,**
carries a connotation of assured excellence, and the
popular eating-house advertises **pies like those your
mother used to make," as if pie-making were a maternal
function. Economy, comfort, and health are supposed
to accompany our domestic food supply, and danger to
follow the footsteps of those who eat in a hotel, a
restaurant, or a boarding house. Is this long-accepted
theory correct? Is the home, as the last stage of our
elaborate processes of social nutrition, a success?

" Home-cooking " is an alluring phrase, but lay aside
the allurement ; the term applies to Eskimo hut, to Choc-
taw wigwam, to Turk and Chinaman and Russian Jew —
whose home-cooking are we praising? Our own, of
course. Which means nothing — ^absolutely nothing — •
but that the stomach adapts itself to what it has to live
on — ^unless it is too poisonous. Of course we like what

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HOME-COOKING
we are used to ; be it sauerkraut or saleratus biscuit. We
like tobacco too, and alcohol, and chloral and morphine.

The long-suffering human system (perhaps toughened
by ages of home-cooking) — ^will adapt itself even to slow
death.

But how does our universally praised home-cooking
affect our health? To find it pure and undefiled, far
from the deleterious products of mere business cookingi
we must go to the isolated farmhouse. Does either the
physician or the epicure point with pride to that dietary P

Its results are not due to lack of proper materials.
There you have no much-blamed " baker's bread " ; no
^ city milk " ; no wilted vegetables and questionable
meats ; no painted confectionery and bakeshop sweets ; no
wild hurry to catch the morning car. You have mother
love and mother instinct untrammelled, with the best
materials we know, pure dairy produce and fresh vege*
tables and fruits. As a result, you should look for
splendid health, clear complexions, bright eyes, perfect
teeth, and sublime digestions. Instead, we find men who
keep fairly well to middle life because their vigorous
out-of-door work enables them to cope for a while with
their home-cooking; but in the women you find a sadly
low average of health and beauty. Dyspepsia is the
rule. False teeth are needed before they are thirty.

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THE HOME

Patent medicine is the family divinity. Their ordinary
home-cooking is pork and potatoes; and their extraor-
dinary home-cooking is such elaborate elegance of pie
and cake as to supply every element of mischief omitted
in the regular diet. The morbid appetites, the uneaiiy
demand for stimulants, both in men and women, the
rarity of good digestion — ^these do not prove much in
favour of this system of preparing food.

The derivation of the habit is clear enough and easily
traced. Among individual animals, the nutritive proc-
esses are simple. By personal effort each creature helps
himself from a free supply, competing mercilessly with
every other creature that comes in his way. Vegetarian
animals compete peaceably as philosophical anarchists;
carnivorous ones compete with more violence. Among
both classes we find homes among those whose food is
portable ; holes, caves, or nests ; places where the young
can be guarded and their food brought to them. From
the grisly heap of bones in the lion's den, or shells below
the squirrel's nest, through the " kitchen middens " of
primitive man, to the daily output of garbage from our
well-loved homes to-day is an unbroken line. " A place
to feed the young " was once a suf&cient definition of a
home, but the home has grown since then. Man is a
social animal. He is part of something; his life is not

126

HOME-COOKING

dependent on his own efforts solely, but on those of many
other men. We get our f ood, not by going out to quar-
rel with one another over a free supply, but by helping
one another in various elaborate processes of production,
distribution, and preparation. In this last process of
preparation women long held a monopoly; and, as
women were kept at home, so food was, naturally, pre-
pared at home. But as soon as men banded together to
go on long expeditions without women — ^which was at
the beginning of the history of war — they learned to
cook and eat away from home, and the cook, as a crafts-
man, was developed. This social functionary has been
officiating for a long time. He has cooked as a busi-
ness, giving his whole time to it; he has cooked for
miscellaneous numbers, and has had to study averages ;
he has cooked for great dignitaries, epicurean and
capricious. So, in course of time, has grown among
us some little knowledge of the art and science of cook-
ing. This growth has not taken place in the home. An
ignorant overworked poor woman, cooking for her
family, has not, and never can have, the time, means, or
opportunity for the large experiment and practice which
have given us the great diet-list of to-day. Each woman,
Reaming only from her mother, has been able only to
hand down to us the habits of a dark, untutored past.

127

THE HOME

Outside the home, man, the specialised cook, acting under
pressure of larger needs and general competition, has
gradually improved the vessels, utensils, and materials
of the home food supply.

Note carefully that, in home-cooking, there are absent
these great necessities of progress — specialisation and
competition, as well as the wide practical experience
which is almost as essential. Go among the most back-
ward peasantry of any country and compare the ** home-
cooking " of each nation in its present form, with the
specialised cooking of the best hotels, clubs, or of those
great official or private entertainments which employ the
professional cook. It is rare, of course, to find home-
cooking wholly unaffected by social cooking, for man, as
an ultra-domestic character, learns something elsewhere
and brings it home ; but the point to be insisted on is that
the development in cooking comes from outside the h(Hne,
and does not originate in it. Still, in spite of all our
progress, the great mass of mankind eats two meals at
home ; women and children, three.

The preparation of food is still the main business of
housekeeping; its labour, the one great labour of the
place ; its cost, the main expense. In building, the con-
veniences for this trade — ^kitchen, dining-room, pantry,
cupboard, and cellar — ^require a large part of the outlay,

HOME-COOKING

and the furnishing of these with linen, china, and silver,
as well as the wooden and iron articles, adds heavily to
the list. The wife and mother still has, for her main
duty, the management of the family food supply, even
if she is not the principal worker, and the maintenance
of domestic service, to keep our food system in motion, is
one of the chief difficulties of modem life. Nine-tenths
of our women " do their own work," as has been before
shown. Those nine-tenths of the female population —
as well as the majority of servants — expend most of their
labour in the preparation of food and the cleansing proc-
esses connected with it.

With all this time, labour, and expense given to the
feeding of humanity, what are the results? How are
we educated in knowledge and taste as to right eating?
What are our general food habits? To these questions
it may be promptly answered that no other animal is
so depraved in its feeding habits as man ; no other animal
has so many diseases of the alimentary system. The dog
ranks next to us in diseases, and shares our home-cook-
ing. The hog, which we most highly recommend, is
** corn-fed,'* not reared on our remnants of the table.
The long and arduous labours of public-spirited men
have lifted our standards of living in many ways.
Public sanitation, beginning outside and slowly driven in

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THE HOME
on the reluctant home, has lowered our death rate in the
great filth-diseases which used to decimate the world.
But the food diseases are not lessened. Wrong eating
and wrong drinking are responsible for an enormous pro-
portion of our diseases and our crimes, to say nothing of
the still larger average of unhealthiness and unhappi-
ness in which we live. Can we get at the causes of this
department of human trouble? and, when found, do they
bear any relation to our beloved custom of home-cooking
and home-eating? We can — and they do. The trouble
springs from two main features: bad food — ^insufficient,
oversufHcient, ill-chosen, or ill-prepared; and our own
ignorance and lack of self-control.

Consider the bad food first. Food is produced all
over the earth, passes through many hands, and is finally
selected by the housewife. She is not a trained expert,
and can never be while she confines herself to serving one
house. She does not handle quantities sufficient or cater
for consimiers enough to gain large knowledge of her
business. She is, in nine cases out of ten, limited
financially in her buying power. These conditions make
the food market particularly open to adulteration, and
to the ofi^ering of inferior materials. The individual
housewife cannot herself discriminate in all the subtleties
of adulterated food, nor has she the time or the means

130

HOME-COOKING
to secure expert tests of her supplies. Moreover, her
separate purchasing power is so small that it cannot in-
timidate the seller; he has ignorance and a small purse
to deal with, and he deals with them accordingly.

The purchase of food in quantities by trained buyers
would lift the grade of our supplies at once. No man
is going to waste time and money in adulteration subject
to daily analysis, or in offering stale, inferior articles
which will not appear saleable to the trained eye. The
wholesale poisoning of babies by bad milk is an evil our
dty governments are seeking to combat, but the helpless
anarchy of a million ignorant homes, unorganised, un-
trained, and obliged to get the milk at once, renders our
governmental efforts almost vain. Insufficient food is
owing, in part, to economic causes, and in part to
ignorance of what the body needs. On the economic side
comes in a most important view of the home as a food
purveyer. The private purchase and preparation of
food is the most expensive method. It is wonderful to
see how people ding to their notion of " the economy **
of home-cooking. By the simplest business laws, of
world-wide application, the small purchaser has to pay
the largest price. The expenses incident to the re-
retailing of food, from the apples rotting on the ground
in New York State to the apples we purchase at twenty

ISl

THE HOME
cents a quart for New York City tables, form a large
part of the cost of living. Thousands of middlemen
thrive like leeches on the long, slow current of food
material, as it pours in myriad dribbling streams from
the great sources of production, far away, into our in-
numerable kitchen doors.

In a city block there are, let us say, two hundred
families, which, at oiur usual average of five individuals
to a family, would number one thousand persons. The
thousand persons should consume, we will say, five hun-
dred quarts of milk a day. The purchase of five hun-
dred quarts of milk and the proportionate cream, as well
as butter, would maintain a nice little dairy — several
blocks together would maintain a large one. Your
bustling restaurant proudly advertises ^^ Milk and cream
fresh every day from our own dairies!'* But your
beloved home has no such purchasing power, but meekly
absorbs pale cultures of tuberculosis and typhoid fever at
eight cents a quart. The poorer people are, the more
they pay for food, separately. The organised purchas-
ing power of these same people would double their food
supply, and treble it.

Besides the expense entailed in purchasing is that of
private preparation. First, the ** plant '* is provided.
For our two hundred families there are two hundred

132

HOME-COOKING
stoves, with their utensils. The kitchen, and all that it
contains, with dining-rooms, etc., have been already re-
ferred to, but should be held firmly in mind as a large
item in rent and furnishing. Next, there is the labour.
Two hundred women are employed for about six hours a
day each, — twelve hundred working hours, — ^at twenty
cents an hour. This means two hundred and forty dol-
lars a day, or sixteen hundred and eighty dollars a week,
that the block of families is paying to have its wastef uUy
home-purchased food more wastef ully home-cooked. Of
course, if these cooks are the housewives, they do not get
the money; but the point is, that this much labour is
worth that amount of money, and that productive energy
is being wasted. What ought it to cost? One trained
cook can cook for thirty, easily ; three, more easily, for a
hundred. The thousand people mentioned need, in
largest allowance, thirty cooks — ^and the thirty cooks,
organised, would not need six hours a day to do the same
work, either. Thirty cooks, even at ten' dollars a week,
would be but three hundred dollars, and that is
some slight saving as against sixteen hundred and
eighty !

We have not mentioned fully another serious evil.
" Insufficient food " would be easily removable from our
list by a more economical method of buying and cooking .

ISS

THE HOME

it. The other element of iiisufBcIency — ^ignorance, —
would go also. If we had skilful and learned cooks and
caterers instead of unskilled and unlearned amateurs,
who know only how to cater to the demands of hungry
children and injudicious men at home. Wise temper-
ance workers know that many men drink because they are
not properly fed; and women, too, consimie tea and
coffee to make up in stimulants for the lack of nutrition
about which they know nothing. Under this same head
comes the rest of that list, the over-sufficient, ill-chosen,
and ill-prepared food. It is not simply that the two
hundred amateur cooks (whether they be permanent wife
or transient servant, they are all, in a business sense,
amateurs, — ask a real cook!) waste money by their
sporadic efforts, but their incapacity wastes our blood in
our veins. We do not die, swift and screaming, from
some sharp poison administered through malice ; but our
poor stomachs are slowly fretted by grease-hardened
particles, and wearied out by heavy doses of hot dough.
Only iron vigour can survive such things.

'^ It is ill-chosen," is one charge against home-cooking.
What governs our choice? Why does a Grerman eat
decaying cabbage and mite-infested cheese, an American
revel in fat-soaked steak and griddle-cakes, a Frenchman
disguise questionable meats with subtly-blended spices,

134

HOME-COOKING
and so on, through the tastes of all the nations and
localities? It is environment and heredity that governs
tis — ^that's all. It is not knowledge, not culture and
experience, not an enlightened taste, or the real choice
of a trained mind capable of choosing.

A child is fed by his mother, who transmits remote
ancestral customs, unchanged by time. Children are
hungry and like to eat. The young stomach is adapted
to its food supply ; it grows accustomed to it and " likes **
it, — and the man continues to demand the doughnuts, the
sauerkraut, the saleratus biscuit, which he ^^ likes."
One ghastly exception should be taken to this smooth
statement. I have said that ^^the young stomach is
adapted to its food supply." Alas, alas ! This is true
of those who survive ; but think of the buried babies,—
of the dear, dead children, of the ^^ diseases incidental to
childhood," — ^and question if some part of that awfid
death-list is not due to our criminal ignorance of what is
proper food ! There is no knowledge, save the filtering
down of ancient customs and what the private cook can
pick up from house to house; no experience, save that
gained by practising on one's own family or the family
of one's employer — and I never heard of either wife or
servant gathering statistics as to who lived and who died
under her cooking — ^no special training ; and no room or

135

THE HOME
time or means to learn! It would be a miracle if aO
should survive.

The ignorance which keeps us so ill-fed is an euentidl
condition of home-cooking. If we had only home-shoe-
making, or home-doctoring, or home-tailoring — barber-
ing — ^what you please — ^we should show the same wide-
spread ignorance and lack of taste. What we have
learned in cooking comes from the advance of that great
branch of human industry in its free social field, and that
advance has reacted to some degree on the immovable
home.

Next consider self-control, the lack of which is so large
a factor in our food diseases. We have attained some
refinement of feeling in painting, music, and other arts ;
why are we still so frankly barbaric in our attitude
toward food? Why does modem man, civilised, edu-
cated, cultured, still keep his body in a loathsome condi-
tion, still suffer, weaken, and die, from foul food habits?
It is not alone the huge evil of intemperance in drink, or
simple gluttony; but the common habits of our young
girls, serenely indulging in unlimited candy, with its
attendant internal consequences; or of our cultured
women, providing at their entertainments a gross ac-
cumulation of unwholesome delicacies, with scarcely
more discrimination than was shown by Heliogabalus.

136

HOME-COOKING
We eat what we like, and our liking is most crude and
low.

The position of the woman who feeds us — the wife
and mother — ^is responsible for this arrest of develop-
ment. She is not a free cook, a trained cook, a scientific
cook ; she belongs to the family. She must cook for the
man because he pays for it. He maintains the home —
and her — ^largely for that very purpose. It is his home,
his table, his market bill; and, if John does not like
onions, or pork, or cereals, they do not appear. If Mrs.
Peterkin paid for it, and John was cook, why John would
cook to please her ! In two ways is Mrs. Peterkin forced
to cater to John's appetite ; by this plain, economic fact,
that it is his food she is cooking, and by the sezuo-eco-
nomic fact that ^' the way to a man's heart is through his
stomach." For profit and for love — ^to do her duty and
to gain her ends — in all ways, the home cook is forced
to do her home cooking to please John. It is no wonder
John clings so ardently to the custom. Never again on
earth will he have a whole live private cook to himself, to
consider, before anything else, his special tastes and
preferences. He will get better food, and he will have
to get used to it. His tastes will be elevated by the
quality of the food, instead of the quality of the food
being adapted solely to his tastes. To the children,

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THE HOME
again, the mother caters under direct pressure of per-
sonal affection. It is very, very hard to resist the daily,
yea, tri-daily, demands of those we love.

It is this steady, alluring effort of subservient love
which keeps us still so primitively self-indulgent in otur
food habits. The mother-love of a dumb animal may
teach her what is right for her young to eat, but it does
not teach the human mother. Ask any doctor, any
trained nurse, anyone who has watched the children of
the poor. If the children of the rich are more wisely fed,
it is not because of any greater amount of mother-love,
but of some degree of mother-education. Motherhood
and wifehood do not teach cooking.

What we need in our system of feeding the world is
not instinct, affection, and duty, but knowledge, prac-
tice, and business methods. Those who are fitted by
natural skill and liking to be cooks should cook, and
many should profit by their improved products. Scien-
tific training, free from the tender pressure of home
habits, would soon eliminate our worst viands ; and, from
the wide choice offered by a general field of patronage,
there would appear In time a cultivated taste. Greater
freedom for personal idiosyncrasy would be given in this
general field of choice, yet a simpler average would un-
doubtedly be formed. Great literatiure and great music

138

HOME-COOKING
were never developed when the bard performed for his
master only.

We, keeping our food system still on this miserable
basis of private catering to appetite, are thereby pre-
vented from studying it with a view to race improve-
ment. The discoveries of the food specialist and scien-
tific dietist are lost in the dark recesses of a million
homes, in the futile, half-hearted efforts of unskilled
labour. What the immediate family ** likes '* is the gov-
erning law ; no matter how wise may be the purpose of
Che mother-cook. With most of us food is scarcely
thought of in its real main use — ^to supply bodily waste
with judiciously combined materials.

The home-bred appetite cries out for " mother's cook-
ing," with no more idea of its nutritive values than has
a child. This is most remarkable among our enormous
farming population, yet there most absolutely the case.
The mechanic or business man has no dealings whatever
with his food except to eat it. He gives over his life's
health, his daily strength, into the hands of his beloved
female domestic ; and asks nothing whatever of her pro-
duction except that it '^ taste good."

But the farmer has a different trade. With him the
whole business of his life is to feed things that they may
grow. He has to replenish the soil with the elements

139

THE HOME
his crops exhaust, in order to reap the best crops, the
most profit. And even more directly with his live-stock;
from hen to horse, with pigs, sheep, and cattle, he has
constantly to consider what to put into them in order to
be sure of the product, not too much grain for the horse,
not too much hay ; enough ^^ green feed " in season ; the
value of the silo, the amount of salt necessary ; the effect
of beets, of wild onions, in the grass and in the butter;
what to give hens in winter to make them lay; how to
regulate the diet for more milk and less cream, or for
less milk and more cream; how to fatten, how to
strengthen, how to improve — ^in all ways the farmer has
to realise the importance of food values in his business.

Yet that same man, day after day, consimies his own
food and sees his children fed, to say nothing of the
mother of his chUdren, without ever giving one thought
to the nutritive values of that food. There must be
enough to satisfy hunger, and it must ^^ taste good,"
according to his particular brand of ancestry, his race
habits, and early environment ; but, beyond that, nothing
is required.

The farmer has assistance in his business. He shares
in the accumulated experience of many farmers, before
him and about him. There are valuable experiments be-
ing made in his behalf by the Bureau of Agriculture.

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HOME-COOKING
He has trade papers to bring him the fruits of the
world's progress in this line. Agriculture is one of the
world's great functions, and has made magnificent prog*
ress. But humaniculture has no Bureau, no Secretary,
no Experiment Stations ; unless we count the recent ex-
periments in boric-acid diet. The most valuable live-
stock on earth are casually fed by the haphazard efforts
of any and every kind of ignorant woman; hired
servants or married servants, as the case may be; dull,
shortsighted, overworked women, far too busy in ^^ doing
the cooking" ever to study the science of feeding hu-
manity. No science could ever make progress in such
hands. Science must rest on broad observation, on the
widest generalisation and deduction, on careful experi-
ment and reconsideration.

This is forever impossible at home. Until the food
laboratory entirely supersedes the kitchen there can be
no growth. Many of us, struggling to sit fast between
two stools, seeing the imperative need of scientific feed-
ing for humanity, yet blindly clinging to the separate
wife-mother-cook functionary, exhort " the woman " to
study all this matter, and cheerfully to devote her life
to scientifically feeding her beloved family.

** The woman " — ^that is, a woman, any woman, every
woman, and that means the deadly Average, the hope-

141

THE HOME

lessly Isolated, the handicapped Maternal, with the Lack
of Specialisation, the Confusion of other Trades, and the
Lack of Incentive, Not until " The woman " in " the
home '* can everywhere manifest a high degree of skill
as a doctor, as an architect, as a barber, as anything,
can she manifest that high degree as a cook.

Cooking is an art; cooking is a science; cooking is
a handicraft; cooking is a business. None of these
fean ever grow without following the laws of all in-
dustrial progress — specialisation, contact and exchange^
legitimate competition, and the stimulus of large world-
incentives. When we have these we shall be able to im-
prove our kind of animal as much as we do other kinds.
We cannot arbitrarily by breeding, but we can by nu-
trition and education — ^to an unknown extent. Nutri-
tion, properly adjusted, nutrition for the human ani-
mal, has hardly been thought of by the home cook. The
inexorable limit of our Home-cooking is the Home.

142

vni

DOMESTIC ART

ONE of the undying effocfe of our lives, of the
lives of half the woPKij is '^ to make home
beautiful/' We love beauty, we love home,
we naturally wish to combine the two. The rich spare
no expense, the aesthetic no care and pains, in this con-
tinuous attempt; and the " home " papers, or " home de-
partments " in other papers, teem with instruction on the
subject for the eager, but untutored many.

In varying fields of work there is a strong current of
improvement, in household construction, furnishing,
and decoration ; and new employments continually appear
wherein- the more cultured few apply their talents to the
selection and arrangement of ^^ artistic interiors " ready-
made for the purchaser. Whole magazines are devoted
to this end, articles unnumbered, books not a few, and
courses of lectures. People who know beauty and love
it are trying to teach it to those who do not, trying to
introduce it where it is so painfully needed — ^in the
home.

THE HOME

Why does it not originate there? Why did the people
who cared most for beauty and art, the Greeks, care so
little for the home? And why do the people who care
most for the home— our Anglo-Saxons — care so little for
beauty and art? And, in such art-knowledge and art-
growth as we have, why is it least manifested at home?
What is there in home-life, as we know it, which proves
inimical to the development of true beauty? If there is
some condition in home life which is inimical to art, is that
condition essential and permanent, or may it be removed
without loss to what is essential and permanent?

Here are questions serious and practical ; practical be-
cause beauty is an element of highest use as well as joy.
Our love of it lies deep, and rests on truest instinct ; the
child feels it passionately ; the savage feels it, we aU feel
it, but few understand it ; and whether we understand it
or not we long for it in vain. We often make our
churches beautiful, our libraries and museums, but our
domestic efforts are not crowned with the same relative
success.

The reasons for this innate lack of beauty in the home
are not far to seek. The laws of applied beauty reach
deep, spread wide, and are inexorable : Truth ; first, last,
and always — ^no falsehood, imitation, or pretence: Sim-
plicity ; no devious meandering, but the direct clear pur-

144

DOMESTIC ART

pose and result: Unity, Harmony, that unerring law
of relation which keeps the past true to the whole — ^never
too much here or there — all balanced and at rest: Re-
straint; no riotous excess, no rush from inadequacy to
profusion.

If the student of art rightly apprehends these laws, his
whole life is richer and sounder as well as his art. If
the art he studies is one under definite laws of construe-

tion, he has to learn them, too; as in architecture, where
the laws of mechanics operate with those of aesthetics, and
there is no beauty if the mechanical laws are defied.

Architecture is the most prominent form of domestic
art. Why is not domestic ardhitecture as good as pub-
lic architecture? If the home is a temple, why should
not our hills be dotted with fair shrines worthy of wor-
ship?

We may talk as we will of " the domestic shrine,'* but
the architect does not find the kitchen stove an inspiring
altar. If it did inspire him, if he began to develop the
idea of a kitchen — ^a temple to Hygeia and Epicurus,
a great central altar for the libations and sacrifices, with
all appropriate accessories for the contributory labour
of the place — ^he could not make a pocket-edition of this
temple, and stick it on to every house in forced connec-
tion with the other domestic necessities.

146

THE HOME

The eating-room then confronts him, a totally differ-
ent motif. We do not wish to eat in the kitchen. We
do not wish to see, smell, hear, or think of the kitchen
while we eat. So the domestic architect is under the
necessity of separating as far as possible these discordant
purposes, while obliged still to confine them to the same
walls and roof.

Then come the bedrooms. We do not wish to sleep in
the kitchen — or in the dining-room. Nothing is further
from our ideals than to confound the sheets with the
tablecloths, the bed with the stove, the dressing table with
the sink. So again the architect, whose kitchen-tendency
was so rudely checked by the dining-room tendency, is
brought up standing by the bedroom tendency, its de-
mand for absolute detachment and remoteness, and the
necessity for keeping its structural limits within those
same walls and roof.

Then follows the reception-room tendency — ^we do not
wish to receive our visitors in the kitchen — or the bed-
room—or exclusively in the dining-room. So the parlour
theme is developed as far as may be, connected with the
dining-room, and disconnected as far as possible from all
the other life-themes going on under that roof.

When we add to these the limits of space, especially in
our cities, the limits of money, so almost universal, and

146

DOMESTIC ART

the limits of personal taste, we may have clearly before
us the reasons why domestic architecture does not thrill
the soul with its beauty.

Whenever it does, to any extent, the reason is as clear.
The feudal castle was beautiful because it had one pre-
dominant idea — defence; and was a stone monument to
that idea. Here you could have truth, and did have it.
Defence was imperative, absolute ; every other need was
subsidiary; a fine type of castle could give room for
unity, simplicity, harmony, and restraint; and stirs us
3'et to delighted admiration. But it was not a comfort-
able dwelling-house.

A cottage is also capable of giving the sense of beauty ;
especially an old thatch-roofed cottage; mossy, mouldy,
leaky, damp. The cottage is an undifferentiated home;
it is primarily a kitchen— with a bedroom or two added—
or included! Small primitive houses, like the white,
square, flat-roofed dwellings of Algiers, group beauti*
fully, or, taken singly, give a good bit of white against
blue fire, behind green foliage.

But as a theme in itself, a thing to study and make
pictures of, the castle, the temple of war, is the most
beautiful type of dwelling place — ^and the least inhab-
itable. In our really comfortable homes we have lost
beauty, though we have gained in comfort. Would it

147

THE HOME

be possible to have comfort and beauty too ; beauty which
would thrill and exalt us, delight and satisfy us, and
which the art critic would dwell upon as he now does on
temple, hall, and church?

Let us here take up the other domestic arts ; surren-
dering architecture as apparently hopeless. We cannot
expect our composers in wood and stone to take a num-
ber of absolutely contradictory themes and produce an
effect of truth, unity, harmony, simpUcity, and restraint ;
but may we not furnish and decorate our homes beauti-
fully? Perhaps we might; but do we? What do we
know, what do we oare, for the elementary laws which
make this thing beautiful, that thing ugly, and the same
things vary as they are combined with others !

In the furnishing and decoration of a home we have
room for more harmony than in the exterior, because each
room may be treated separately according to its especial
purpose, and we can accustom ourselves to the aesthetic
jar of stepping from one to another, or even bring them
all under some main scheme.

But here we are confronted by the enormous unre-
stricted weight of the limitation which is felt least by the
architect — ^personal taste. We do not dictate much to
our builders, most of us ; but we do dictate as to the inside
of the house and all that is in it. The dominating in-

148

DOMESTIC ART

fluence in home decoration is of course the woman. She
is the final arbiter of the textures, colours, proportions,
sizes, shapes, and relations of human production. How
does she effect our output? What is her influence upon
art — the applied art that is found, or should be found,
in everything we make and use?

We may buy, if we can afl^ord it, specimens of art, pic-
torial or sculptural art, or any other, and place them in
our houses ; but the mere accumulation of beautiful ob-
jects is not decoration; often quite the contrary. There
are many beautiful vases in the shop where you bought
yours ; there is but one in the Japanese room — ^and there
is beauty.

The magpie instinct of the collector has no part in a
genuine sense of beauty. An ostentatious exhibit of
one's valuable possessions does not show the sense of
beauty. A beautiful chamber is neither show-room nor
museum. That personal " taste '* in itself is no guide
to beauty needs but little proof. The " taste " of the
Flathead Indian, of the tattooed Islander, of all the
grades of physical deformity which mankind has ad-
mired, is sufficient to show that a personal preference is
no ground for judgment in beauty.

Beauty has laws, and an appreciation of them is not
possessed equally by all. The more primitive and

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THE HOME
ignorant a race, or class, the less it knows of true
beauty.

The Indian basket-makers wove beautiful things, but
they did not know it; give them the cheap and ugly pro-
ductions of our greedy " market " and they like them
better. They may unconsciously produce beauty, but
they do not consciously select it.

Our women are far removed from the primitive sim-
plicity that produces unconscious beauty; and they are
also far removed from that broad culture and wide view
of life which can intellectually grasp it. They have
neither the natural instinct nor the acquired knowledge
of beauty ; but they do have, in million-fold accumula-
tion, a " personal taste.'* The life of the woman in the
home is absolutely confined to personal details. Her field
of study and of work is not calculated to develop large
judgment, but is calculated to develop intense feeling;
and feeling on a comparatively low plane. She is forced
continually to contemplate and minister to the last details
of the physical wants of humanity in ceaseless daily rep-
etition. Whatever tendency to develop artistic feeling
and judgment she might have in one line of her work,
is ruthlessly contradicted by the next, and the next ; and
her range of expression in each line is too small to allow
of any satisfying growth.

DOMESTIC ART

The very rich woman who can purchase others' things
and others' judgment, or the exceptional woman who
does work and study in some one line, may show develop-
ment in the sense of beauty; but it is not produced at
home. The love of it is there, the desire for it, most
cruelly aborted ; and the result of that starved beauty-
sense is what we see in our familiar rooms.

Being familiar, we bear with our surroundings ; per-
haps even love them ; when we go into each other's homes
we do not think their things to be beautiful; we think
ours are because we are used to them; we have no ap-
preciation of an object in its relation to the rest, or its
lack of relation.

The bottled discord of the woman's daily occupations
if quite sufficient to account for the explosions of discord
on her walls and floors. She continually has to do ut-
terly inharmonious things, she lives in incessant effort to
perform all at once and in the same place the most irrec-
oncilable processes.

She has to adjust, disadjust, and readjust her mental
focus a thousand times a day ; not only to things, but to
actions ; not only to actions, but to persons ; and so, to
live at all, she must develop a kind of mind that does
not object to discord. Unity, harmony, simplicity, truth,
restraint — ^these are not applicable in a patchwork life,

161

THE HOME
however hallowed by high devotion and tender love.
This IS why domestic art is so low — so indistinguishable.

When our gre^^t Centennial Exhibition was given us,
a wave of beauty spread into thousands of homes, but it
did not originate there. The White City by the lake was
an inspiration to myriad lives, and wrought a lovely
change in her architecture and many other arts ; but tie
Black City by the Lake is there yet, waiting for another
extra-domestic uplifting.

The currents of home-life are so many, so diverse, so
contradictory, that they are only maintained by using
the woman as a sort of universal solvent ; and this posi-
tion of holding many diverse elements in solution is net
compatible with the orderly crystallisation of any of
them, or with much peace of mind to the unhappy
solvent.

The most conspicuous field for the display of tKe
beauty sense — or the lack of it — in our home life, is ii
textile fabrics and their application to the body. The
House is the foundation of textile art. People who li^e
out of doors wear hides, if they wear anything. In tie
shelter and peace of the house, developed by ever-widen-
ing commerce, grew these wonderful textile arts, the eso-
lution of a new plane for beauty. We find in nature
nothing approaching it, save in the limited and passiig

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DOMESTIC ART
form of spreading leaf and petal. To make a continu-
ous substance soft as flowers, warm as furs, brilliant as
the sunset — ^this was a great step in art.

Woven beauty is a home product, and in the house we
are most free to use and admire it. The ** street dress,"
even the most unsophisticated, is under some restrictions ;
but the house dress may be anything we please. There
is nothing in the mechanical limitations of house life to
pervert or check this form of loveliness. We are free to
make and to use the most exquisite materials, to wear the
most pleasing of textures and shapes.

Why, then, do we find in this line of development such
hideously inartistic things? Because the discords of
domestic industries and functions prevent a sense of har-
mony even here. Because the woman, confined to a primi-
tive, a savage plane of occupation, continues to mani-
fest an equally savage plane of aesthetic taste.

One of the most marked features of early savage deco-
ration is in its distortion and mutilation of the body to
meet arbitrary standards of supposed beauty. An idea
of beauty, true or false, is apprehended, its line of special
evolution rapidly followed, and there is no knowledge of
physiology or grasp of larger harmonies of bodily grace
to check the ensuing mutilation.

The Zulus decorate their cattle by cutting the dewlap

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THE HOME
into fringe, and splitting and twisting the growing horns
into fantastic shapes. Some savage women tie the gas-
trocnemius muscle tightly above and below, till the ^^ calf
of the leg " looks like a Dutch cheese on a broomstick.
Some tie strings about the breasts till they dangle half
detached ; some file the teeth or pluck out the eyebrows.

In the home, among women, still appear these majai-
f estations of a crude beauty-sense, unchecked by larger
knowledge. Our best existent examples are in the Chi-
nese foot-binding custom, and ours of waist-binding.
The initial idea of the comet is in a way artistic. We per-
ceive that the feminine form has certain curves and pro-
portions, tending thus and so ; and following the tend-
ency we proceed to exaggerate those curves and pro-
portions and fix them arbitrarily. This is the same law
by which we conventionalise a flower for decorative pur-
poses, turning the lily of the field into the fteur-de-lis of
the tapestry. The Egyptians did it, to an extreme de-
gree, in their pictorial art, reducing the human body to
certain fixed proportions and attitudes.

The application of these principles to living bodies
is peculiar to the savage, and its persistence among our
women is perhaps the strongest proof of the primitive
nature of the home. As women enter the larger life of
the world these limitations are easily outgrown; the

154

DOMESTIC ART
working-woman cannot make a conventionalised orna-
ment of her body, and the business woman does not care
to; the really educated woman knows better, and the
woman artist would be bitterly ashamed of such an
offence against nature; only the home-bound woman
peacefully maintains it.

To the scientific student, man or woman, the sturdy
reappearance of this very early custom is intensely in-
teresting ; he sees in the ^^ newest fashion " of holding
and binding the body a peculiar survival of the very
oldest fashion in personal decoration known to us. The
latest corset advertisement ranks ethnologically with the
earliest Egyptian hieroglyph, the Aztec inscriptions, and
races far behind them.

The woman's love of beauty finds its freest expression
along lines of personal decorations, and there, as in tiae
decoration of the house, we «ee the same crippling in-
fluence.

She loves beautiful textures, velvet, satin, and silk,
soft muslin and sheer lawn ; she loves the delicate fantasy
of lace, the alluring richness of fur ; she loves the colour
and sparkle of gems, the splendour of burnished metal,
and, in her savage crudity of taste, she slaps together any
and every combination of these things and wears them
happily.

156

THE HOME

A typical extreme of this ingenuous lack of artistic
principles is the recent, and still present, enormity of
trimming lace with fur. This combines the acme of all
highly wrought refinement of texture and exquisite deli-
cacy of design, a fabric that suggests the subtleties of
artistic expression with a gossamer tenuity of grace;
this, and dressed hide with the hair still on, the very first
cover for man's nakedness, the symbol of savage luxury
and grandeur, of raw barbaric wealth, which suggests
warmth, ample satisfying warmth and crude splendour
in its thick profusion ! We cut up the warmth and ampli-
tude into threads and scraps which can only suggest the
gleanings of a tan-yard rag-picker, and use these shabby
fragments to trim lace! Trim what is in itself the sub-
limated essence of trimming, with the leavings of the
earliest of raw materials ! Only the soul which spends its
life in a group of chambers connected merely by me-
chanical force ; in a group of industries connected merely
by iron tradition, could bear a combination like that —
to say nothing of enjoying it. Domestic art is almost
a contradiction in terms.

The development of art, like the development of in-
dustry, requires the specialisation, the life-long devotion,
impossible to the arbitrary combinations of home life.
Where you find great beauty you find a great civic sense,

156

DOMESTIC ART
most clearly in that high-water mark of human progress
in this direction, ancient Greece. Within the limits of
their cities, the Greeks were more fully ** civilised " than
any people before or since. They thought, felt, and
acted in this large social contact; and so developed a
sufficient breadth of view, a wide, sweet sanity of mind,
which allowed of this free growth of the art-sense. Great
art is always public, and appears only in periods of high
social development. The one great art of the dark ages
— ^religious architecture — ^flourished in that universal at-
mosphere of '^ Christendom," the one social plane on
which all met.

The Greeks were unified in many ways; and their
highly socialised minds gave room for a more general
development of art, as well as many other social faculties.

Household decoration was not conspicuous, nor elabo-
rate attire ; and while their women were necessarily beau-
tiful as the daughters of such men, it was the men whose
beauty was most admired and immortalised. The women
stayed at home, as now, but the home did not absorb men,
too, as it does now. When art caters to private tastes,
to domestic tastes, to the wholly private and domestic
tastes of women, art goes down.

The Home was the birthplace of Art, as of so many
other human faculties, but is no sufficing area for it* So

167

THE HOME

long as the lives of our woman are spent at home, their
tastes limited by it, their abilities, ambitions, and desires
limited by it, so long will the domestic influence lower art.

" So much the worse for art ! '* will stoutly cry the de-
fenders of the home ; and they would be right if we could
have but one. We can have both.

A larger womanhood, a civilised womanhood, special-
ised, broad-minded, working and caring for the public
good as weU as the private^ will give us not only better
homes, but homes more beautiful. The child will be
cradled in an atmosphere of harmonious loveliness, and
its influence will be felt in all life. This is no trifle of an
artificially cultivated aesthetic taste ; it is one of nature's
deepest laws. ^^ Art " may vary and suffer in different
stages of our growth, but the laws of beauty remain the
same; and a race reared under those laws will be the
nobler.

These more developed women will outgrow the magpie
taste that hoards all manner of gay baubles ; the monkey-
taste that imitates whatever it sees ; the savage taste that
distorts the human body; they will recognise in that
body one infinitely noble expression of beauty, and re-
fuse to dishonour it with ugliness.

They will learn to care for proportion as well as
plumpness, for health as well as complexion, for strength

158

DOMESTIC ART
and activity as essentials to living loveliness, and to see
that no dress can be beautiful which in any way contra-
dicts the body it should but serve and glorify. We do
not know, because we have not seen, the difFerence to our
lives which will be made by this large sense of beauty in
the woman — ^in the home; but we may be assured that,
while she stays continually there, we shall have but our
present stage of domestic art.

159

IX
DOMESTIC ETHICS

THE relation of the home to ethics is so vital,
so intimate, so extensive, as to call for the
utmost care and patience in its study.

The ^^ domestic virtues " are well known to us, and
well loved. We have a general conviction that all our
virtues as well as charity begin at home; that the ethical
progress of man is a steady stream flowing out of the
home, and as far as we compare one virtue with another,
we assume the domestic virtues to be the best.

In half the race we ask nothing but the domestic
virtues ; in the other half we look for something further;
but consider such civic and social virtues as appear to be
offshoots of the domestic. We call the home ^* the cradle
of all the virtues," and never imagine for a moment that
it can cradle anything else — ^in the line of ethics.

Now let us make a careful examination of this field;
first establishing a standard of human conduct and
character, and then studying the relation of the home to
that standard. The same consideration referred to in
previous chapters is here most urgently pressed upon

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DOMESTIC ETHICS

the reader: that all the qualities found in the home do
not necessarily originate there. As a race rises and im-
proves, its improvement appears in the home, as else-
where. But that improvement is in itself due to varying
conditions. The diffusion of intelligence following the
discovery of the art of printing lifted the general
average mind, and so lifted the home as well as other
departments of life. But that increase of intelligence
did not originate in home life, and is in no way due to
its influence.

The sense of human liberty which spread rapidly
among us in the early years of the settlement of this
country, following, as it did, the splendid dash for
religious liberty which brought so many of our ances-
tors here, has borne fruit in our home life. We have
more freedom in the family relation than is found in
older forms of government, but this larger freedom did
not originate in the home and is in no way to be ac-
credited to it.

Home-life, as such, does in itself tend to produce cer-
tain ethical qualities; qualities not produced, or not in
any such degree, by other fields of life. Constant as-
sociation with helpless infancy develops a generous care
and kindness — ^that is, it does so when the helpless infants
are one's own. The managers of foundling and orphan

161

THE HOME
asylums do not seem always to be so affected. Constant
association with the inevitable errors and mistakes of
childhood develops patience and sympathy, or tends to
do so. There are qualities brought out in home life
which extend their influence into the life of the world*
The young man or woman who has had good home in-
fluence shows that advantage all through life. But
there are also qualities brought out in the world's life
apart from the home; and the man or woman affected
by these shows them in the home life. We find in our
homes the gathered flowers of civilisation, of Chris-
tianity, of progress in general ; and unconsciously ac-
credit the homes with the production of these beautiful
results — quite erroneously.

The influence of religion, as we all know when we stop
ito think of it, has done much more for us than the in-
fluence of the home. The Canaanites had homes — yet
gave their children to Moloch. The demand of the idol
had more power than the appeal of the child. The
Hindoos have homes, yet give their babies to the water,
their widows to the fire.

Besides religion there are many other influences which
affect human character and conduct ; the influences of our
government, our education, our business. We are seek-
ing here to point out precisely what ethical qualities are

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DOMESTIC ETHICS
developed by home life, good or bad; and to show
further that the present condition of the home is not
final, nor vitally essential. We may so change the con-
ditions of home life as to retain all that modifies char-
acter for good, and to discard all that modifies it for
evil.

The home as a permanent institution in society, if
rightly placed and understood, works for good. The
home in its non-essential conditions, if wrongly placed in
our scheme of thought, if misunderstood, if out of
proportion and loaded with anachronisms, works evil.
In the complex group of qualities which make up the
human character to-day, for good and ill, many in-
fluences are traceable ; and we wish here to disentangle
from among them some lines of influence, and show
what place is held by the home in making us what we
are and what we wish to be.

What is the preferred type of excellence in humanity
according to our social instincts and to the measure of
history? We began as savages, and the savage standard
of ethics is easily grasped; we have progressed a long
way beyond that savage standard ; but ours is still well
within the reach of common understanding. Without
seeking for careful sequence let us enumerate our prin-
cipal human virtues :

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THE HOME
' Love; with derivatiyes of kindness, sympathy, cour-
tesy, etc. Truth; with honesty, accuracy, etc. Cour-
age; connects with strength and wisd(Hn. Justice; with
a right humility. Self-control ; with endurance, patience,
and again with courtesy; also with tanperance and
chastity. Honour ; a high, inflexible standard of various
virtues.

These are arbitrary general types, but do fairly
enough for this study. A human being possessed of
these in high degree we should call ^^ good." They all
combine well with one another, and have many deriva-
tives, some of which are above noted. Their common
opposites are as easily given :

Hate ; unkindness, coldness, rudeness. Falsehood ; ly-
ing, dishonesty, inaccuracy. Cowardice; connects with
weakness and ignorance. Injustice; this allows pride —
rests on ignorance. Self-indulgence; followed by in-
temperance, unchastity, impatience, and other vices. Dis-
honour; meaning a low standard of virtues in general.

Man the savage had of these courage, in some lines ;
endurance and patience, in some lines ; civilised man sur-
passes him in these, and has developed all the others.
What are the conditions which have brought forth this
degree of virtue in us, and how does the home rank
among those conditions?

164

DOMESTIC ETHICS

Let us first do it full justice. Mother-love is the foun^
dation and permanent force of home life ; and, mother-
love is, indeed, the parent of all the love we know. Al-'
truism was bom of babyhood. The continued existence
of the child — of a succession of children; the perma-
nent presence of helplessness and its irresistible demands
for care; this forced us into a widening of the sym*
pathies, a deepening of sensitiveness to others' needs;
this laid the foundations of hiunan love. In this sense^
the home is the cradle of one of our very greatest vir-
tues. Love began with the mother; but it should not
stop with her. ** Mother-love " is precisely limited to
its own children.

Few, indeed, are the mothers who love other women's
children. As ** mother " is a synonym for all kindness,
so ** stepmother " is a synonym for all unkindness. Folk-
lore and fairy-tale indicate old fact. Infant helpless-
ness and orphan need are not only what appeals to the
mother— it is most the blood-tie, the physical relation.

Civilisation and Christianity teach us to care for " the
child," motherhood stops at " my child."

Still, in the home we do find the nursery of all the
lines of family affection, parental, filial, fraternal, and
these are good. Hearts able to love ten could more
easily take in twenty; the love of one's own parents

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THE HOME

spread to our present care for the aged ; the power of
loving grew, and, as soon as it overstepped the limits of
the home, it grew more rapidly. We have learned to
love our neighbours — ^if not as ourselves, at least, better
than strangers. Wfi have learned to love our fellow-
citizens, fellow-craftsmen, fellow-countrymen. To-day
the first thrills of international good-will are stealing
across the world — ^and we are extending our sympathy
even to the animals.

All this beautiful growth of love began at home ; but
the influence of the home, as it now exists upon the
growth, is not so wholly gratifying. The love that we
call human, the love of one another, the love Christ
teaches us, is extra-domestic. We are not told, '* Inas-
much as you have done it to your own families you have
done it unto me." We are not exhorted to an ever-
increasing intensity of devotion to our own blood-
relations.

Both the teaching of our religion and the tendency
of social progress call for a larger love, and the home,
in its position of arrested development, primitive indus-
try, and crippled womanhood, tends rather to check
that growth than to help it. The man's love for his
family finds expression in his labour for other people —
he serves society, and society provides for him and

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DOMESTIC ETHICS
his dear ones ; so good will spreads and knits ; comrade-
ship and fellow-feeling appear, friendship brings its
pure height of affection; this is the natural line of
development in the great social virtue, love.

But the woman, still expressing her love for her fam-
ily in direct personal service, misses all that. The primi-
tive father, to feed the chUd, went forth himself and
killed some rabbit — ^and the primitive mother cooked It:
love, in grade A. The modem father, to feed his child,
takes his thousandth part in some complex industry, and
receives his thousand-fold share of the complex products
of others' industry, and so provides for the child far
more richly than could the savage: love, in grade
Z. But the modem mother — ^if we can call her so by
courtesy — ^to feed her child still does nothing but cook
for it, still loves in grade A ; and the effect of that per-
sistence of grade A is to retard the development of
grade Z. Mother-love is the fountain of all our human
affection ; but mother-love, as limited by the home, does
not have the range and efficacy proper to our time. The
home, as at present maintained, checks the growth of
love.

As to Truth. This is a distinctly modem virtue. It
comes in slowly, following power and freedom. The
weak lie, a small beast hides; the lion does not hide.

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THE HOME

The slave lies — ^and the courtier ; the king does not lie —
he does not need to.

The most truthful nations are the most powerful. The
most truthful class is the most powerful. The more
truthful sex is the more powerful. Weakness, helpless-
ness, ignorance, dependence, these breed falsehood and
evasion ; and, in child, servant, and woman, the denizens
of the home, we have to combat these tendencies. The
standard of sincerity of the father may be taught th*
son ; but the home is not the originator of that standard.
In this, as in other virtues, gain made in quite other
fields of growth is necessarily transmitted to the home;
but fair analysis must discriminate between the effect of
religion, of education, of new social demands, and the
effect of the home as such.

Courage comes along two main lines — by exposure to
danger, and by increase of strength. The home, in its
very nature, is intended to shield from danger; it is in
origin a hiding place, a shelter for the defenceless.
Staying in it is in no way conducive to the growth of
courage. Constant shelter, protection, and defence may
breed gratitude — ^must breed cowardice. We expect
timidity of *' women and children " — the housemates.
Yet courage is by no means a sex attribute. Every spe-
cies of animal that shows courage shows it equally in

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DOMESTIC ETHICS
male and female — or even more in mother than in father*
** It is better to meet a she-bear robbed of her whelps
Chan a fool in his folly." This dominant terror — the
fool — ^is contrasted with the female bear — ^not the male.
Belligerence, mere eombativeness, is a masculine attri-
bute ; but courage is not.

The cowardice of women is a distinctly home product.
It is bom of weakness and ignorance ; a weakness and an
ignorance by no means essential feminine attributes, but
strictly domestic attributes. Keep a man from birth
wrapped in much cloth, shut away from sky and sun,
wind and rain, continually exhausting his nervous en-*
ergy by incessant activity in monotonous little thingS|
and never developing his muscular strength and skill by
suitable exercise of a large and varied nature, and he
would be weak. Savage women are not weak. Peasant
women are not weak. Fishwives are not weak. The
home-bound woman is weak, as would be a home-bound
man. Also, she is ignorant. Not, at least not nowadays,
ignorant necessarily of books, but ignorant of general
Kfe.

It is this ignorance and this weakness which makes
women cowards; cowards frank and unashamed; cow-
ards accustomed to be petted and praised, to be called
** true woman " • because they scream at that arch-terror

169

THE HOME

of the home — a mouse. This home-bred cowardice, so
admired in women, is of necessity transmitted to their
sons as well as 'daughters. It is laughed out of them
and knocked out of them, but it is bom into them, relent-
lessly, with every generation. As black mothers must
alter the complexion of a race, so must coward mothers
alter its character. Apart from fighting — ^where the
natural combative sex-tendency often counts as courage
— our men are not as brave as they would be if their
mothers were braver. We need courage to-day as much
as we ever needed it in our lives. Courage to think and
speak the truth; courage to face convention and preju-
dice, ridicule and opposition. We need courage in men
and women equally, to face the problems of the times;
and we do not get that courage from the home.

The sense of Justice is one of the highest human at-
tributes; one of the latest in appearance, one of the
rarest and most precious. We love and honour justice;
we seek in some main lines of life to enforce it, after a
fashion; but many of our arrangements are still so
palpably unjust that one would think the virtue was but
dreamed of, as yet unborn. Justice follows equality and
freedom. To apprehend it at all the mind must first per-
ceive the equal, and then resent the unequal. We must get
a sense of level, of balance, and then we notice a deflec-

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; DOMESTIC ETHICS

tion. As a matter of social evolution our system of legal

I justice springs from the primitive market place, the dis^
putes of equals, the calling in of a third party to adjudi-
cate. The disputants know instinctively that an outsider
can see the difficulty better than an insider. Slowly the
arbiter was given more power, more scope ; out of much
experience came the crystallisation of law. ^' Justice ! "
was the cry of the lowest before the highest; and the
greatest kings were honoured most for this great
virtue.

The field for justice has widened as the state widened ;
it has reached out to all classes; its high exercise dis-
tinguishes the foremost nations of our times. Yet even
in the teeth of the law-courts injustice is still common ; in
everyday life it is most patent.

We have made great progress in the sense of justice
and fair play; yet we are still greatly lacking in it«
What is the contribution of domestic ethics to this
mighty virtue? In the home is neither freedom nor
equality. There is ownership throughout ; the dominant
father, the more or less subservient mother, the utterly
dependent child ; and sometimes that still lower grade —
the servant. Love is possible, love deep and reciprocal ;
loyalty is possible; gratitude is possible; kindness, to
ruinous favouritism, is possible.; unkindness, to all con-

171

THE HOME

spiracy, hate, and rebellion is possible ; justice is not
possible.

Justice was bom outside the home and a long way
from it ; and it has never even been adopted there.

Justice is wholly social in its nature — extra-domestia
— even anti-domestic. Just men may seek to do justly
in their homes, but it is hard work. Intense, personals
feeling, ^lose ties of blood, are inimical to the exercise of
justice. Do we expect the judge upon the bench to do
justice, dispassionate, unswerving, on his own child — ^his
own wife — ^in the dock? If he does, we hail him as more
than mortal. Do we expect a common man — ^not a
judge with all the training and experience of his place,
but a plain man — ^to do justice to his own wife and his
own child in the constant intimacy of the home? Do we
expect the mother to do justice to the child when the
child is the offender and the mother the offended? Where
plaintiff, judge, and executioner are lodged in one per-
son ; where tliere is no third party — ^no spectators even —
only absolute irresponsible power, why should we — ^how
could we — expect justice! We don't. We do not even
think of it. No child cries for " Justice ! '* to the deaf
walls of the home — ^he never heard of it.

He gets love — endless love and indulgence. He gets
anger and punishment with no court of appeal.

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►

DOMESTIC ETHICS
He gets care — ^neglect — discourtesy — affection — ^indif-
ference — cruelty — and sometimes wise and lovely train-
ing — ^but none of these are justice. The home, as such,
in no way promotes justice; but, in its disproportionate
and unbalanced position to-day, palpably perverts and
prevents it.

Allied to justice, following upon large equality and
recognition of others, comes that true estimate of one's
self and one's own powers which is an unnamed virtue.
** Humility " is not it — ^to undervalue and depreciate
one's self may be the opposite of pride, but it is not a
virtue. A just estimate is not humility. But call it
humility for convenience' sake; and see how ill it
flourishes at home. In that circumscribed horizon small
things look large. There is no general measuring point,
no healthy standard of comparison.

The passionate love of the wife, the mother, and
equally of the husband, the father, makes all geese
swans. The parents idealise their children; and the
children, even more restricted by the home atmosphere —
for they know no other — ^idealise the parents. This is
sometimes to their advantage — often the other way.
Constant study of near objects, with no distant horizon
to rest and change the focus, makes us short-sighted;
and, as we all know, the smallest object is large if you

173

THE HOME

hold it near enough. Constant association with one's
nearest and dearest necessarily tends to a disproportion-
ate estimate of their values.

There is no perspective — cannot be — ^in these close
quarters. The infant prodigy of talent, praised and
petted, brings his production into the cold light of the
market, under the myriad facets of the public eye, to
the measurement of professional standards — ^and no most
swift return to the home atmosphere can counterbalance
the effect of that judgment day. A just estimate of
one's self and one's work can only be attained by the
widest and most impersonal comparison. The home
estimate is essentially personal, essentially narrow. It
sometimes errs in underrating a world-talent ; but nine
times out of ten it errs the other way — overrating a
home-talent. Humility, in the sense of an honest and
accurate estimate of one's self, is not a home-made prod-
uct. A morbid modesty or an unfounded pride often is.
The intense self -consciousness, the prominent and sensi-
tive personality developed by home life, we are all
f amiUar with in women.

The woman who has always been in close personal
relation with someone, — daughter, sister, wife, mother, —
and so loved, valued, held close, feels herself neglected
and chilly when she comes into business relations. She

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DOMESTIC ETHICS
eels personal neglect in the broad indifference of office
r shop; and instantly seeks to establish personal rela-
ions with all about her. As a business woman she out*
^ws it in time. It is not a sex-quality, it is a home-
[uality ; found in a boy brought up entirely at home as
rell as in a girl. It tends to a disproportionate estimate
»f self; it is a primitive quality, common to children and
ay ages; it is not conducive to justice and true social
idjustment.

Closely allied to this branch of character is the power
»f self-control. As an initial human virtue none lies
leeper than this ; and here the home has credit for much
lelp in developing some of the earlier stages of this
^at faculty. Primitive man brought to his dawning
itunan relation a long-descended, highly-developed Ego.
Ele had been an individual animal ^^ always and always,"
le had now to begin to be a social animal, a collective
inimal, to develop the social instincts and the social
x>nduct in which lay further progress.

The training of the child shows us in little what his-
;ory shows us in the large. What the well-bred child
iias to learn to make him a pleasing member of the
Tamily is self-control. To restrain and adjust one's
lelf to one*s society — ^that is the line of courtesy — ^the
ine of Christianity — the line of social evolution. The

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THE HOME

home life does indeed teach the beginning of self-control;
but no more. As compared with the world, it represents
unbridled license. ^^ In company '' one must wear so
and so, talk so and so, do so and so, look so and so. To
^^ feel at home " means relaxation of all this.

This is as it should be. The home is the place for
personal relief and rest from the higher plane of social
contact. But social contact is needed to develop social
qualities, constant staying at home does not do it.

The man, accustomed to meet all sorts of people in
many ways, has a far larger and easier adjustment.
The woman, used only to the close contact of a few
people in a few relations, as child, parent, servant,
tradesman ; or to the set code of ^^ company manners,"
has no such healthy hiunan plane of contact.

" I never was so treated in my life ! '* she complains —
and she never was — ^at home. This limits the range of
life, cuts off the widest channels of growth, overde-
velops the few deep ones ; and does not develop self-con-
trol. The dressing-gown-and-slippers home attitude is
temporarily changed for that of " shopping," or " visit-
ing," but the childish sensitiveness, the disproportionate
personality, remain dominant.

A too continuous home atmosphere checks in the
woman the valuable social faculties. It checks it in the

176

DOMESTIC ETHICS
lan more insidiously, through his position of easy
oastery over these dependents, wife, children, servants ;
.nd through the constant catering of the whole minage
o his special tastes. If each man had a private tailor
ihop in his back yard he would be far more whimsical
ind exacting in his personal taste in clothes. Every
latural tendency to self-indulgence is steadily increased
3y the life service of an entire wife. This having one
srhole woman devoted to one's direct personal service is
ibout as far from the cultivation of self-control as any
process that could be devised.

The man loves the woman and serves her — ^but he
serves her through his service of the world — and she
serves him direct. He can fuss and dictate as to details,
he can develop all manner of notions as to bacon, or
toast, or griddle cakes ; the whole cuisine is his, he sup-
ports it, it is meant to please him, and under its encom-
passing temptation he increases in girth and weight ; but
not in self-control. He may be a wise, temperate,
judicious man, but the home, with its dispropor-
tionate attention to personal desires, does not make
him so.

No clearer instance could be given of the effect of
domestic ethics. In this one field may be shown the
beneficent effects of the early home upon early man, the

177

THE HOME

continued beneficent effects of what is essential in
the home upon modem man; and the most evil
effects of the domestic rudiments upon modem man.
The differing ages and sexes held together by love, yet
respecting one another's privacy, demand of one another
precisely this power of self-control. Children together,
^ith no adults, become boisterous and unruly; adults
together, with no children, become out of sympathy with
childhood; the sexes, separated, tend to injurious ex-
cesses ; but the true home life checks excess, develops what
is lacking, harmonises all.

What does the morbid, disproportioned, overgrown
home life do? It tends to develop a domineering self-
ishness in man and a degrading abnegation in woman-
or sometimes reverses this effect. The smooth, uncon-
scious, all-absorbing greed which the unnaturally de-
veloped home of to-day produces in some women, is as
evil a thing as life shows. Here is a human creature
who has all her life been loved and cared for, sheltered,
protected, defended; everything provided for her and
nothing demanded of her except the exercise of her
natural feminine functions, and some proficiency in the
playground regulations of " society.'*

The degree of sublimated selfishness thus produced by
home life is quite beyond the selfishness we so deplore in

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DOMESTIC ETHICS
men. A man may be — often is — deplorably selfish in
his home life; but he does not expect all the world to
treat him with the same indulgence. He has to give as
well as take in the broad, healthy, growing life of the
world.

The woman has her home-life to make her selfish, and
has no world life to offset it. Men are polite to her on
account of her sex — not on account of any power, any
achievement, any distinctive human value, but simply
because she is a woman. Her guests are necessarily
polite to her. Her hosts are necessarily polite to her,
and so are her fellow-guests. Her servants are neces-
sarily poUte to her. Her children also ; if they are not
she feels herself abused, denied a right.

The homeland its social tributaries steadily work to
develop a limitless personal selfishness in which the
healthy power of self-control is all unknown. One way
or the other swings the pendulimi ; here the woman pours
out her life in devotion to her husband and children ; in
which case she is developing selfishness in them with as
much speed and efficacy as if she were their worst enemy ;
and here again the woman sits, plump and fair, in her
padded cage, bedizening its walls with every decoration ;
covering her own body with costly and beautiful things ;
feeding herself, her family, her guests; running from

179

THE HOME

meal to meal as if eating were really the main business
of a human being. This is the extreme.

Our primitive scheme requires that the entire time of
the woman-who-does-her-own-work shall be spent in
ministering to the physical needs of her family ; and in
the small minority who have other women to do it for
them, that she shall still have this ministry her main
care — and shall have no others. It is this inordinate
demand for the life and time of a whole woman to keep
half a dozen people fed, cleaned, and waited on, which
keeps up in us a degree of self-indulgence we should, by
every step of social development, have long since out-
grown.

The personal preparation of food by a loving wife and
mother does not ensure right nourishment — ^that we have
shown at length; but it does ensure that every human
soul thus provided for shall give far too much thought to
what it eats and drinks and wherewithal it shall be
clothed. The yielding up of a woman's life to the ser-
vice of these physical needs of mankind does not develop
self-control, nor its noble line of ensuing virtues —
temperance, chastity, courtesy, patience, endur-
ance.

See the child growing up under this disproportionate
attention ; fussy, critical, capricious, always thinking

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DOMESTIC ETHICS

of what he wants and how he wants it. The more his
mother waits on him, the more she has to do so; he
knows no better than to help himself to the offered life.
See the husband, criticising the coffee and the steak ; or
so enjoying and praising them that the happy wife
eagerly spends more hours in preparing more dishes that
John will like. It is a pleasant, roseate atmosphere.
All are happy in it. Why is it not good? Because it
is a hotbed of self-indulgence. Because it constantly
maintains a degree of personal devotion to one's appe-
tites which would disappear under a system of living
suited to our age.

Self-control is developed by true home life; by true
family love. Family, love, unmodified by social relation,
gives also the family feud; the unconscionably narrow
pride of the clansman ; the home life of the first century,
arbitrarily maintained in the twentieth, gives us its con-
stant contribution of first-century ethics.

As to honour — ^that delicate, deep-rooted, instinctive
ethical sense ; applied so rigidly to this, so little to that ;
showing so variously; ^^ business honour," ** military
honour,*' " professional honour," " the honour of a
gentleman" — ^what is the standard of honour in the
home?

The only ** honour " asked of the woman is chastity ;

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THE HOME

quite a special sex-distinction, not as yet demanded in
any great degree of the man.

If the home develops chastity, it seems to discriminate
sharply in its preferred exponent. But apart from that
virtue, what sense of honour do we find in the home-bound
woman? Is it lo keep her word inflexibly? A woman's
privilege is to change her mind. Is it to spare the
weaker? Would that some dream of this high grace
could stand between the angry woman and the defence-
less child. Is it to respect privacy, to scorn eaves-
dropping, to regard the letter of another person as
inviolate ?

The standard of honour in the home is not that of
'^ an officer and a gentleman." The things a decent and
well-educated woman will sometimes do to her own chil-
dren, do cheerfully and unblushingly, are flatly dis-
honourable; but she does not even know it. And the
things she does outside the home, with only her home-bred
sense of honour to guide her, are equally significant.
To slip in front of others who are standing in line; to
make engagements and break them; to even engage
rooms and board, and then change her plans without
letting the other party know; thus entailing absolute
money loss to a perfectly innocent person, without a
qualm; this is frequently done by women with a high

182

DOMESTIC ETHICS
standard of chastity ; but no other sense of honour what-
ever.

The home is the cradle of all the virtues, but we are
in a stage of social development where we need virtues
beyond the cradle size. The virtues begun at home
need to come out and grow In the world as men need to
do— and as woman need to do, but do not know It. The
ethics of the home are good In degree. The ethics of
human life are far larger and more complex.

Our moral growth Is to-day limited most seriously by
the persistent maintenance In half the world of a primi-
tive standard of domestic ethics.

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DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

I0N6 is the way from the primal home, with its
simple child-mo^if , to the large and expensive
Vhouse of entertainment we call home to-day.
The innocent ^' guest-chamber" early added to the family
accommodations has spread its area and widened its de-
mandsy till we find the ultra-type of millionaire mansion
devoting its whole space, practically, to the occupation
of guests — ^f or even the private rooms are keyed up to a
comparison with those frankly built and furnished for
strangers. The kitchen, the dining-room, the pantry,
the table-furniture of all sorts, are arranged in style and
amplitude to meet the needs of guests. The sitting-room
becomes a " parlour," the parlour a " drawing-room "
with " reception-room " addition ; and then comes the
still more removed " ballroom " — a remarkable apart-
ment truly, jto form part of a home. Some even go so
far as to add a theatre — ^that most essentially public of
chambers — ^in this culminating transformation of a home
to a house of entertainment.

From what once normal base sprang this abnormal

184

DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT
growth? How did this place of love and intimacy, the
outward form of our most tender and private relations,
so change and swell to a place of artificial politeness and
most superficial contact? The point of departure is not
hard to find; it lies in that still visible period when
hospitality was one of our chief virtues.

Of all the evolving series of himian virtues none is
more easily studied in its visible relation to condition and
its rapid alterations than hospitality. Moreover,
though considered a virtue, it is not so intermingled with
our deepest religious sanction as to be painful to dis-
cuss ; we respect, but do not worship it.

Hospitality is a quality of human life, a virtue which
appears after a certain capacity for altruism is de-
veloped ; not a very high degree, for we find a rigid code
of hospitality among many savage tribes; and which
obtains in exact proportion to the distance, difficulty,
and danger of travelling.

We still find its best type among the Bedouin Arabs
and the Scotch Highlanders ; we find it in our own land
more in the country than the city, more in the thinly
settled and poorly roaded south than in the more thickly
settled and better roaded north ; and most of all on the
western frontier, where mountain and desert lie between
ranch and ranch.

186

THE HOME

To call out the most lively sense of hospitality the
traveller must be weary (that means a long, hard road),
and " distressed *' — open to injury, if not hospitably
received. To have a fresh, clean, rosy traveller drop in
after half an hour's pleasant stroll does not touch the
springs of hospitality. The genuine figure to call out
this virtue is the stranger, the wanderer, the pilgrim.

Hospitality will not stand constant use. The steady
visitor must be a friend ; arid friendship is quite a dif-
ferent thing from hospitality. That finds its typical
instance in the old Scotch chief sheltering the hunted
fugitive; and defending him against his pursuers even
when told that his guest was the murderer of his son.
As guest he was held sacred ; he had claimed the rights
of hospitality and he received them. Had he returned
to make the same demand every few days, even without
renewing his initial offence, it is doubtful if hospitality
would have held out.

A somewhat thin, infrequent virtue is hospitality at its
heights, requiring intervals of relaxation. " With-
draw thy foot from thy neighbour's house, lest he weary
of thee and hate thee,'* says the proverb of the very
people where the laws of hospitality were sacred; and
" the stranger within thy gates ** came under the regular
provision of household law.

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DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

Hospitality became a sort of standing custom under
feudalism, as part of the parental care of the Lord of
the Land; and thus acquired its elements of pride and
ostentation. Each nobleman owned all the land about
him; the traveller had to claim shelter of him either
directly or through his dependents, and the castle was the
only place big enough for entertainment. The nobleman
saw to it that no other person on his domain should be
able to offer much hospitality. So the Castle or the
Abbey had it all.

A little of this spirit gave character to the partly
danger-based southern hospitality. It was necessary
to the occasional stranger on the original and legitimate
grounds t it became a steady custom to the modem Lord
of the Manor, none of whose subsidiary fellow-citizens
had the wherewithal to feed and shelter guests. But
hospitality, even in that form, is not what issues cards
and lays red carpet under awnings from door to curb.

Here no free-handed cordial greeting keeps the visitor
to dinner — ^the dinner where the plates are named and
numbered and the caterer ready with due complement of
each expensive dish. Hospitality must blush and apol-
ogise — " I'm sorry, but you must excuse me, I have
to dress for dinner ! " and " Why, of course ! I forgot it
was so latei — dear me! the Jenkinses will have come

187

THE HOME
before me if I don't hurry home ! '' On what ground,
then, is that dinner given — ^why are the Jenkinses asked
that night? If not the once sacred spirit of hospitality,
is it the still sacred spirit of friendship?

Are the people we so expensively and elaborately en-
tertain — and who so carefully retaliate, card for card,
plat for plat and dollar for dollar — ^are these the
people whom we love? Among our many guests is an
occasional friend. The occasional friend we entreat to
come and see us when we are not eptertaimngi

Friendships are the fruit of true personal expression,
the drawing together that follows recognition, the
manifest kinships of the outspoken soul. In friendship
we discriminate, we particularise, we enjoy the touch and
interchange of like characteristics, the gentle stimulus
of a degree of unlikeness. Friendship comes naturally,
spontaneously, along lines of true expression in work, of
a casual propinquity that gives rein to the unforced
thought. More friendships are formed in the prolonged
association of school-life or business life, in the intimacy
of a journey together or a summer's camping, than ever
grew in a lonely lifetime of crowded receptions. Friend-
ship may coexist with entertainment, may even thrive in
spite of it, but is neither cause nor result of that strange
process.

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DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

What, then, is " entertainment," to which the home
18 sacrificed so utterly — ^which is no part of fatherhood,
motherhood, or childhood, of hospitality or friendship?

On what line of social evolution may we trace the
growth of this amazing phenomenon; this constant
gathering together of many people to eat when they are
not hungry, dance when they are not merry, talk when
they have nothing to say, and sit about so bored by their
absurd position that the hostess must needs hire all man-
ner of paid performers wherewith to " entertain " them?

Here is the explanation: humanity is a relation. It
is not merely a number of human beings, like a number
of grains of sand. The human being, to be really
human, must be associated in various forms; grouped
together in the interchange of function. The family
relation, as we have seen, does not in itself constitute
humanity ; human relations are larger.

Man, as a separate being, the personal man, must
have his private house to be separate in. Man, as a
collective being, the social man, must have his public
house to be together in. This does not mean a drinking
place, but any form of building which shelters our com-
mon social functions. A church is a public house — in it
we meet together as human beings ; as individuals, not as
families ; to perform the common social function of wor-

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THE HOME

ship. All religions have this collective nature — ^people
come together as human beings, under a common impulse.

The home is a private house. That belongs to us sep-
arately for the fulfilment of purely personal functions.
Every other form of building on earth is a public house^
a house for people to come together in for the fulfilment
of social functions. Church, school, palace, mill, shop,
post oflice, railway station, museum, art gallery, library,
every kind of house except the home is a public house.
These public houses are as essential to our social life
and development as the private house is to our physical
existence.

Inside the home are love, marriage, birth, and death;
outside the home are agriculture, manufacture, trade,
commerce, transportation, art, science, and religion*
Every human — i. ^., social — ^process goes on outside the
home, and has to have its appropriate building. In
these varied forms of social activity, humanity finds its
true expression ; the contact and interchange, the stimu-
lus and relief, without which the human soul cannot
live.

Humanity mtLst associate, that is the primal law of our
being. This association, so far in history, has been
almost entirely confined to men. They have associated
in war, in work, in play. Men have always been found

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DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

in groups, on land and sea, doing things together; de-
veloping comradeship, loyalty, justice ; enjoying the full
swing of human faculties. But women, with the one
partial exception of the privileges of the church, have
been denied this most vital necessity of human life —
association. Every woman was confined separately, in
her private house, to her most separate and private duties
and pleasures; and the duties and pleasures of social
progress she was utterly denied. The church alone
gave her a partial outlet ; gave her a conunon roof for a
common function, a place to come together in ; and to the
church she has flocked continually, as her only ground of
human association.

But as society continued to evolve, reaching an ever-
higher degree of interdependent complexity, developing
in the human soul an ever-growing capacity and neces-
sity for wide, free, general association, and transmit-
ting that increasing social capacity to the daughter as
well as the son, the enormous pressure had to find some
outlet. ** What will happen if an irresistible force meets
an immovable body? " is the old question, and the answer
18 ** The irresistible force will be resisted and the im-
movable body be moved." That is exactly what has
happened. The irresistible force of the public spirit
has met the immovable body of the private house — ^and

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THE HOME

that great, splendid, working social force has been frit-
tered away in innumerable little processes of private
amusement ; the quiet, beautiful, private home has been
bloated and coarsened in immeasurable distention as a
place of public entertainment.

There is more than one line of tendency, good and bad*
at work to bring about this peculiar phenomenon of
domestic entertainment ; but the major condition, without
which it could not exist, is the home-bound woman ; and
the further essential, without which it could not develop
to the degree found in what we call " society," is that
the home-bound woman be exempt from the domestic
industries, exempt from the direct cares of motherhood,
exempt from any faintest hint of the great human re-
sponsibility of mutual labour; exempt from any legiti-
mate connection with the real social body; and so, still
inheriting the enormously increasing pressure of the
social spirit, she pours out her energies in this simula-
crum of social life we still call " social/'

What is the effect, or rather what are some of the
effects, of this artificial game of living upon the real
course of life? And in particular how does it affect the
home, and how does the home affect it? In the first
place this form of human association, based upon the
activities of otherwise idle women, and requiring the

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DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

home as its vehicle of expression, tends to postpone
marriage. The idle woman, contributing nothing to the
household labours or expenses, requires to be wholly
supported by her husband. This would be a check on
marriage even if she stayed at home twirling her thumbs ;
for he would have to provide women to wait on her, on
him, on the children, in default of her service as ^^ house-
wife." He could not marry as soon as the man whose
wife, strong and skilled in house-service, held up her end
of the business, as does the farmer's and mechanic's wife
to-day.

But when to the expense of maintaining a useless
woman is added the expense of entertaining her useless
friends ; when this entertainment takes the form, not of
hospitality sharing the accommodations of the home, the
food of the family, but of providing extra rooms, furni-
ture, dishes, and servants; of special elaboration of
costly food; and of a whole new gamut of expensive
clothing wherein to entertain and be entertained — ^then
indeed does marriage recede, and youth wither and
blacken in awaiting it.

Current fiction, current jokes, current experience, and
all the background of history and literature, show us
this strong and vicious tendency at work; and ugly is
the work it does. No personal necessities, no family

19S

THE HOME

necessities, call for the expenses lavished on entertain-
ment. Once started, the process races on, limited by no
law of nature, for it is an unnatural process ; excess fol-
lowing excess, in nightmare profusion. Veblen in his
great book " The Theory of the Leisure Qass,'* treats
of the general development of this form of " conspicuous
waste," but this special avenue of its maintenance is
open to further study.

Women who work in their homes may be ignorant,
uncultured, narrow; they may act on man as a
check to mental progress; they may retard the
development of their remaining industries and be
a heavy brake on the wheels of social progress; they
may and they do have this effect ; but they are at least
honest workers, though primitive ones. Their homes
are held back from full social development, but they are
legitimate homes. Their husbands, if selfish and vicious,
waste money and life in the saloons, finding the social
contact they must have somewhere ; but the wives, getting
along as they can without social contact, meet the basic
requirements of home life, and offer to the honest and
self -controlled young man a chance to enjoy " the com-
forts of a home,'' and to save money if he will. I am
by no means pointing out this grade of woman's labour
as desirable; that is sufficiently clear in previous chap-

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DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

ters; but it is in origin right, and, though restricted}
not abnormal.

Domestic entertainment is abnormal. It is an ejffort
to meet a natural craving in an unnatural way. It con-
tinually seeks to ^^ bring people together '' because they
are unnaturally kept apart; and to furnish them with
entertainment in lieu of occupation. Any person
whose work is too hard, too long, too monotonous, or
not in itself attractive, needs " relaxation," " amuse-
ment," " recreation " ; but this does not account in the
least for domestic entertainment. That is ojffered to
people who do not work at all. Those of them who do*
part of the time, as business men sufficiently wealthy to
be " in society," and yet sufficiently human to keep on in
real social activities, are not relaxed, amused, or rec-
reated by the alleged entertainment.

Those who most conspicuously and entirely give them-
selves up to it are most wearied by it. They may de-
velop a morbid taste for the game, which cannot be satis-
fied without it ; but neither are they satisfied within it.

The proofs of this are so patent to the sociologist as
to seem tedious in enumeration ; one alone carries weight
enough to satisfy any questioner — ^that is the ceaseless
and rapid contortions of invention with which the ^^ en-
tertainment " varies.

195

THE HOME

If the happy denizens of the highest ^^ social circles "
sat serene and content like the gods upon Olympus, ban-
queting eternally in royal calm, argument and criticism
would fall to the ground. If they rose from their
eternal banqueting, refreshed and strong, recreated in
vigour and enthusiasm, and able to plunge into the real
activities of life, then we might well envy them, and
strive, with reason, to attain their level. But this is
in no wise the case. Look for your evidence at the requi-
sites of entertainment in any age of sufficient wealth and
peace to maintain idlers, and in no age more easily
typical than our own, and see the convulsive and in-
essant throes of change, the torrent of excess, the license,
the eccentricity, the sudden reaction to this and that
extreme, with which the wearied entertainers seek to
devise entertainment that will entertain.

The physiologist knows that where normal processes
are arrested abnormal processes develop. The persistent
energy of the multiplying cell finds expression in cyst
and polypus as readily as in good muscle and gland ; and,
whereas the normal growth finds its natural limit and
proportion in the necessary organic interchange with
other working parts of the mechanism, no such healthy
check acts upon the abnormal growth.

Legs and arms do not grow and stretch indefinitdy,

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DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

putting out wabbling, pendulous eccentricities here and
there; but a tumour grows without limit and without
proportion ; without use, and, therefore, without beauty.
It takes no part in the bodily functions, and, therefore,
is a disease. Yet it is connected with the body, grows
in it, and swells hugely upon stolen blood. Social life
has this possibility of morbid growth as has the physical
body.

All legitimate social functions check and limit each
other, as do our physical functions. No true branch of
the social service can wax great at the expense of the
others. If there are more in any trade or profession
than are needed, the less capable are dropped out — can-
not maintain a place in that line of work. Our use to
each other is the natural check and guide in normal
social growth. This whole field of domestic entertain-
ment is abnormal in its base and direction, and therefore
has no check in its inordinate expansion. As long as
money can be found and brains be trained to minister to
its demands the stream pours on; and all industry and
art are corrupted in the service.

True social intercourse, legitimate amusement, is quite
another matter. Human beings must associate, in in-
numerable forms and degrees of intimacy. Perfect
friendship is the most intense, the closest form, and our

197

THE HOME
great national and international organisations the largest
and loosest. Between lies every shade of combination,
temporary and permanent, deep and shallow, all useful
and pleasant in their place. A free human being,
rightly placed in society, has first his work — or her work
-—the main line of organic relation. That means special
development, and all affiliations, economic and personal,
that rest on that specialisation.

Then come the still larger general human connections,
religious, political, scientific, educational, in which we
join and work with others in the great world-functions
that include us all. Play is almost as distinctively a
human function as work — ^perhaps quite as much so; and
here again we group and re-group, in sports and games,
by " eights,'* by " nines,*' by " elevens,** and all progres-
sive associations. Then, where the play is so subtle and
elaborate as to require a life's work, as in the great
social function of the drama, we have people devoting
their time to that form of expression, though they may
seek their own recreation in other lines.

All natural mingling to perform together — ^as in the
harvest dances and celebrations of all peoples — or to
enjoy together the performance of others, as when we
gather in the theatre, this is legitimate human life;
and, while any one form may be overdeveloped, by

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DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT
excessive use, as an unwise athlete may misuse his
body, it is still in its nature right, and good, if not
misused.

But the use of the home as a medium of entertainment
is abnormal in itself, in its relation, or, rather, in its total
lack of relation to the real purpose of the place. The
happy privacy of married love is at once lost. The quiet
wisdom, peace, and loving care which should surround
the child are at once lost. The delicate sincerity of per-
sonal expression, which should so unerringly distinguish
one's dress and house, is at once lost. The only shadow
of excuse for cumbering the home with crude industries —
our claim that we do this so as to more accurately meet
the needs of the family — ^is at once lost. The whole
household machinery, once so nobly useful, and still
interesting, as a hand-loom or spinning wheel, is prosti-
tuted to uses of which the primal home had no concep-
tion.

In an ideal home we should find, first, the perfect
companionship of lovers; then the happy, united life
of father, mother, and child, of brother and sister ; then
all simple, genuine hospitality; then the spontaneous
intercourse of valued friends — ^the freedom to meet and
mingle, now more, now less, in which, as character de-
velops, we slowly find our own, and our whole lives

199

THE HOME

are enriched and strengthened by right companion-
ship.

Right here is the point of departure from the legiti-
mate to the illegitimate ; from what is natural, true, and
wholly good to this avenue of diseased growth. As we
reach out more and more for a wider range of contact —
a chance of more varied association — ^we should leave the
home and find what we seek in its own place : the general
functions of human life, the whole wide field of hrunan
activity. In school, in college, the growing soul finds at
once possibilities of contact impossible at home.

True association is impossible without conmion action.
We do not sit voiceless and motionless, shaking hands
with each other's souls. True and long-established
friends and lovers may do this for a season. ^^ Silence
is the test of friendship," someone has said ; but friend-
ship and love require something more than this for birth
and maintenance. The " ties " of love and friendship are
found in the common memories and common hopes, the
things we have done, do, and will do, for and with each
other.

The home is for the family, and at most, a few
" familiar " friends. The wider range of friendship,
actual and potential, that the human soul of to-day re-
quires, is not possible at home. See the broad graded

SOO

DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

list of a man's school friends and college friends, class-
mates, and fellows in club and society, associates in
games and sports, business friends of all degrees, friends
and associates in politics ; he has an enormous range of
social contact, from every grade of which he gets some
good, and, out of the whole, some personal friends he
likes to have come freely to his home.

Contrast with this the woman's scale — ^the average
woman, she whose " sphere " is wholly in the home. By
nature — ^that is, by hiunan nature — she has the same
need and capacity for large association. Being pruned
down to a few main branches, confined almost wholly to
the basic lines of attachment known equally to the sav-
age, she pours a passionate intensity of feeling into her
narrow range. The life-long give-and-take with a
friend of whose private life one knows nothing is im-
possible to her. She must monopolise, being herself
monopolised from birth.

This intensity of feeling, finally worn down by the
rebuff it must needs meet, gives place in the life of the
woman who is able to " entertain," to the " dear five
hundred friends " of that sterile atmosphere. It is
no longer the free reaching out of the individual toward
those who mean help and strength, breadth and change
and progress, rest and relaxation. In the varied life of

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THE HOME
the world we are brought in contact with many kinds of
people, in different lines of work, and are drawn to those
who belong to us. In the monotonous life of ^* society "
we are brought in contact with the same kind of people,
or people whose life effort is to appear the same — all
continually engaged in doing the same thing. If any
new idea jars the monotony, off rushes the whole crowd
after it — bicycle, golf, or ping-pong — ^till they have
made it monotonous, too.

No true and invigorating social intercourse can take
place among people who are cut off from real social
activities, whose mediiun of contact is the utterly irrele-
vant and arbitrary performance of what they so exqui-
sitely miscall *^ social functions.'' The foundation error
lies in the confinement of a social being to a purely do-
mestic scale of living. By bringing into the home peo-
ple who have no real business there, they are instantly
forced into an artificial position. The home is no place
for strangers. They cannot work there, they cannot
play there, so they must be " entertained.'* So starts
the merry-go-round. The woman must have social con-
tact, she cannot go where it is in the normal business of
life, so she tries to drag it in where she is ; forcing the
social life into the domestic. The domestic life is
crowded out by this foreign current, and, as there is no

£02

DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT
fdaoe for legitimate social activities, in any home or
series of homes, however large and costly, the illegitimate
social activities are at once set up.

The train of evils to the health of society we are all
acquainted with, though not with their causes. Soci*
ology is yet too new to us for practical application. We
are too unfamiliar with normal social processes to dis*
tinguish the abnormal, even though suffering keenly
under it. Yet this field is so within the reach of every-
one that it would seem easy to understand.

The human being's best growth requires a happy»
quiet, comfortable home; with peace and health, order
and beauty in its essential relations. The human being
also requires right social relation, the work he is best
suited to, full range of expression in that work, and in-
tercourse free and spontaneous with his kind. Women
are human beings. They are allowed the first class of
relations — ^the domestic ; but denied the other — ^the social.
Hence they are forced to meet a normal need in an ab-
normal way, with inevitable evil results.

We can see easily the more conspicuous evils of luxury
and extravagance, of idleness, excitement, and ill health,
of the defrauded home, the withering family life, the
black shadows beyond that; but there are others we do
not see. Large among these is our loneliness. The

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THE HOME

machinery of domestic entertaimnent is paradoxically in
our way. We are for ever and for ever flocking together,
being brought together, arranging to meet people, to be
met by people, to have other people meet each other, and
meanwhile life passes and we have not met.

** How I wish I could see more of you ! " we sigh to
the few real friends. Your friend may be at the same
dinner — ^taking out someone else, or, even taking you
out — ^in equal touch with neighbours at either side and
eyes opposing. Your friend may be at the same dance —
piously keeping step with many another; at the same
reception, the same tea, the same luncheon — ^but you do
not meet. As the " society " hand is gloved that there
be no touching of real flesh and blood, so is the society
soul dressed and defended for the fray in smooth phrase
and glossy smile — a well-oiled system, without which
the ceaseless press and friction would wear us raw, but
within which we do anything but ** meet."

For truth and health and honest friendliness, for the
bringing out of the best there is in us, for the mainte-
nance of a pure and restful home-life and the develop-
ment of an inspiring and fruitful social life, we need
some other medium of association than domestic enter-
tainments. And we are rapidly finding it. The woman's
club is a most healthy field of contact, and the woman's

S04

DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT
clubhouse offers a legitimate common ground for large
gatherings.

The increasing number of women in regular business
life alters the whole position. The business woman has
her wider range of contact during the day, and is glad
to rest and be alone with her family at night. If she
desires to go out, it is to see real friends, or to some
place of real amusement. When all women are honestly
at work the " calling habit '' will disappear perforce,
with all its waste and dissimulation.

Given a healthy active life of true social usefulness
for all women, and given a full accommodation of public
rooms for public gatherings, and the whole thing takes
care of itself. The enormous demand for association
will be met legitimately, and the satisfied soul will gladly
return from that vast field of social life to the restful
quiet, the loving intimacy, the genuineness of home-life,
with its constant possibilities of real hospitality and the
blessings of true friendship.

806

XI
THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

THE effect of the house upon women is as im-
portant as might be expected of one con-
tinuous environment upon any Uving creature.
The house varies with the varying power and preference
of the owner ; but to a house of some sort the woman has
been confined for a period as long as history. This
confinement is not to be considered as an arbitrary im-
prisonment under personal cruelty, but as a position
demanded by public opinion, sanctioned by religion, and
enforced by law.

In the comparative freedom to ** walk abroad '' of our
present-day civilised women, we too quickly forget the
conditions immediately behind us, when even the market-
ing for the household was done by men, and the condi-
tions still with us for many millions of women in many
countries who are house-bound for life.

To briefly recount the situation, we find in the pre-
human home the mother sharing the hole or nest with
her young, also sharing the outside task of getting food
for them. In some species the father assists the mother,

806

THE LADY OP THE HOUSE
he never does It all. In other cases the father is no
assistance, even a danger, seeking in cannibal infanticide
to eat his own young ; the mother in this case must feed
and defend the young, as well as feed herself, and so
must leave home at frequent intervals.

The common cat is an instance of this. She is found
happily nursing the kittens in her hidden nest among the
hay ; but you often find the kittens alone while the mother
goes mousing, and a contributary Thomas you do not
find.

As we have before seen, our longer period of infancy
and its overlapping continuity, a possible series of babies
lasting twenty years or so, demanded a permanent home ;
and so long as the mother had sole charge of this pro-
gressive infant party she must needs be there to attend
to her maternal duties. This condition is what we have
in mind, or think we have in mind, when maintaining the
duty of women to stay at home.

Wherever woman's labour is still demanded, as among
an savages, in the peasant classes where women work in
the fields, and in our own recent condition of slavery,
either the mother takes her baby with her, or a group of
babies are cared for by one woman while the rest are at
work. Again, among our higher classes, almost the first
step of increasing wealth is to depute to a nurse the

807

THE HOME

mother's care, in order that she may be free from this too
exacting claim. The nurse is a figure utterly unknown
to animals, save in the collective creatures, like the bee
and ant; a deputy-mother, introduced by us at a very
early period. But this sharing of the mother's duties
has not freed the woman from the house, because of
quite another element in our human life. This is the
custom of ownership in women.

The animal mother is held by love, by " instinct ** only;
the human mother has been for endless centuries a pos-
session of the father. In his pride and joy of possession,
and in his fear lest some other man annex his treasure,
he has boxed up his women as he did his jewels, and any
attempt at personal freedom on their part he considered
a revolt from marital allegiance.

The extreme of this feeling results in the harem-
systcm, and the crippled ladies of China; wherein we
find the women held to the house, not by their own
maternal ties, of which we talk much but in which we
place small confidence, but by absolute force.

This condition modifies steadily with the advance of
democratic civilisation, but the mental habit based upon
it remains with us. The general opinion that a woman
should be in the home is found so lately expressed as in
the works of our present philosopher, Mr. Dooley. In

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THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

his " Expert Evidence " he says, ** What the coort ought
to 've done was to call him up and say * Lootgert, where's
your good woman? ' If Lootgert cudden't tell, he ought
to be hanged on gineral principles ; f r a man must keep
his wife around the house, and when she isn't there it
shows he's a poor provider.'*

The extent and depth of this feeling is well shown by
a mass of popular proverbs, often quoted in this connec-
tion, such as ^*A woman should leave her house three
times— when she is christened, when she is married, and
when she is buried " (even then she only leaves it to go
to church), or again, ^^ The woman, the cat, and the
chimney should never leave the house." So absolute is
this connection in our minds that numbers of current
phrases express it, the Housewife — ^Hausfrau, and
the one chosen to head this chapter — ^The Lady of the
House.

Now what has this age-long combination done to the
woman, to the mother and moulder of human character ;
what sort of lady is the product of the house?

Let us examine the physical results first. There is
no doubt that we have been whitened and softened by
our houses. The sun darkens, the shade pales. In the
house has grown the delicate beauty we admire, but are
we right in so admiring?

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THE HOME

The highest beauty the world has yet known was bred
by the sun-loving Athenians. Their women were home-
bound, but their men raced and wrestled in the open air.
No argument need be wasted to prove that air and sun
and outdoor exercise are essential to health, and that
health is essential to beauty. If we admire weakness
and pallor, it by no means shows those qualities to
be good; we can admire deformity itself, if we are
taught to.

Without any reference to cause or necessity, it may be
readily seen that absolute confinement to the house must
have exactly the same efi^ect on women that it would on
men, and that effect is injurious to the health and vigour
of the race. It is possible by continuous outdoor train-
ing of the boys and men to counteract the ill effect of the
indoor lives of women; but why saddle the race with
difficulties? Why not give our children strong bodies
and constitutions from both sides?

The rapid and increasing spread of physical culture
in modem life is helping mend the low conditions of
human development; but the man still has the advan-
tage.

This was most convincingly shown by the two statues
made by Dr. Sargent for the World's Fair of 1898
from an extended series of measurements of college boys

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THE LADY OF THE HOUSE
and girls. Thousands and thousands of specimens of
our young manhood and young womanhood were care-
fully measured, and there stand the two white figures so

show how we compare in beauty — ^the men and women
of our time.

The figure of the man is far and away more beautiful
than that of the woman. It is better proportioned as a
whole; she is too short-legged, too long-waisted, too
narrow-chested. It is better knit, more strongly and
accurately ^ set up." She does not hang together well at
all — ^the lines of connection are weak and wavering, and
in especial does she lack any power and grace in the main
area, the body itself, the torso. There is the undeveloped
chest and the over-developed hips; and between them,
instead of a beautifully modelled trunk, mere shapeless
tissues, crying mutely for the arbitrary shape they are
accustomed to put on outside! We are softer and
whiter for our long housing ; but not more truly beau-
tiful.

The artist seeks his models from the stately burden-
bearing, sun-browned women of Italy ; strong creatures,
human as well as feminine. The house life, with its
shade, its foul air, its overheated steaminess, its in-
numerable tiring small activities, and its lack of any of
those fine full exercises which built the proportions of

811

THE HOME
the Greeks, has not benefited the body of the lady
thereof; and in injuring her has injured all mankind,
her children.

How of her mind? How has the mental growth of
the race been afi^ected by the housing of women? Apply
the question to men. Think for a moment of the men-
tal condition of humanity, if men too had each and
every one stayed always in the home. The results are easy
to picture. No enlargement of industry, only personal
hand-to-mouth laboiur: not a trade, not a craft, not a
craftsman on earth; no enlargement of exchange and
commerce, only the products of one's own field, if the
house-bound were that much free: no market, local,
national, or international ; no merchant in the world.

No transportation, that at once ; no roads — ^why roads
if all men stayed at home? No education— even the
child must leave home to go to school ; no art, save the
squaw-art of personal decoration of one's own hand-
made things. No travel, of course, and so no growth
of any human ties, no widespread knowledge, love, and
peace. In short, no human life at all — ^if men, all men,
had always stayed at home. Merely the life of a self-
maintained family — ^the very lowest type, the type we
find most nearly approached by the remote isolated
households of the " poor whites," of the South. Even

212

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE
they have some of the implements and advantages of
civilisation, they are not utterly cut off.

The growth of the world has followed the widening
lives of men, outside the home. The specialised trade,
with its modification of character; the surplus produc-
tion and every widening range of trade and commerce ;
the steadily increasing power of distribution, and trans-
portation, with its increased area, ease, and speed ; the en-
suing increase in travel now so general and continuous ;
and following that the increase in our knowledge and
love of one another ; all — all that makes for civilisation,
for progress, for the growth of humanity up and on
toward the race ideal — ^takes place outside the home*
This is what has been denied to the lady of the house —
merely all human life !

Some human Uf e she must needs partake of by the
law of heredity, sharing in the growth of the race
through the father; and some she has also shared
through contact with the man in such time as he was
with her in the house, to such a degree as he was willing
and able to share his experience. Also her condition has
been steadily ameliorated, as he, growing ev^^r broader
and wiser by his human relationships, brought wisdom
and justice and larger love into his family relation-
ship.

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THE HOME
But the gain came from without, and filtered down to the
woman in most niggardly fashion.

Literature was a great world-art for centuries and
centuries before women were allowed to read — ^to say
nothing of write ! It is not long since the opinion was
held that, if women were allowed to write, they would
but write love letters ! In our last century, in civilised
Christian England, Harriet Martineau and Jane Austen
covered their writing with their sewing when visitors
came in ; writing was " unwomanly ! *'

The very greatest of our human gains We have been
the slowest to share with woman : education and democ-
racy.

We have allowed them religion in a sense — as we have
allowed them medicine — ^to take; not to give! They
might have a priest as they might have a doctor, but
on no account be one ! Religion was for man to preach
— ^and woman to practise.

In some churches, very recently, we are at last per-
mitting women to hold equal place with men in what they
deem to be the special service of Grod, but it is not yet
common. Ber extra-domestic education has been won
within a lifetime; and there are still extant many to
speak and write against it, even in the Universities —
those men of Mezozoic minds ! And her place as active

S14

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

participant in democratic government is still denied by
an immense majority, on the ground — ^the same old
underlying ground — that it would take her from the
house! Here, clear and strong, stands out that ancient
theory, that the very existence of womanhood depends on
staying in the house.

We have seen what has been denied to woman by
absence from the world ; what do we find bestowed upon
her by the ceaseless, enclosing presence of the house?
How does staying in one's own house all one's life affect
the mind? We cannot ask this question of a man, for
no man has ever done it except a congenital invalid.
Nothing short of paralysis will keep a man in the house.
He would as soon spend his life in petticoats, they are
both part of the feminine environment — ^no part of his.
He will come home at night to sleep, at such hours as
suit him. He likes to eat at home, and brings his friends
to see the domestic group — ^house, wife, and children;
all, things to be fond and proud of, things a man wishes
to own and maintain properly. But for work or play,
out he goes to his true companions — ^men, full-grown
human creatures who understand each other ; in his true
place — ^the world, our human medium.

The woman, with such temporary excursions as our
modern customs permit, works, plays, rests, does all

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THE HOME

things in her house, or in some neighbouring house — the
lame grade of environment. The home atmosphere is
hers from birth to death. That this custom is rapidly
changing I gladly admit. The women of our country
and our time are marching out of the home to their
daily work by millions, only to return to them at night
with redoubled affection; but there are more millions
far, many more millions, who are still housewives or
ladies of houses.

The first result is a sort of mental myopia. Looking
always at things too near, the lens expands, the focus
shortens, the objects within range are all too large, and
nothing else is seen clearly. To spend your whole time
in attending to your own affairs in your own home
inevitably restricts the mental vision; inevitably causes
those same personal affairs to seem larger to you than
other's personal affairs or the affairs of the nation.

This is a general sweeping consequence of being
house-bound ; and it is a heavily opposing influence to all
human progress. The little-mindedness of the house-
lady is not a distinction of sex. It is in no essential
way a feminine distinction, but merely associatively
feminine in that only women are confined to houses.

A larger range of interest and care instantly gives a
resultant largeness of mind, in women as well as men.

216

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE
Such free great lives as have been here and there at-
tained by women show the same broad human character-
istics as similar lives of men. It can never be too fre-
quently insisted upon, at least not in our beclouded time,
that the whole area of human life is outside of, and
irrelevant to, the distinctions of sex. Race character-
istics belong in equal measure to either sex, and the
misfortune of the house-bound woman is that she is
denied time, place, and opportunity to develop those
diaracteristics. She is feminine, more than enough, as
man is masculine more than enough; but she is not
human as he is human. The house-life does not bring
out our humanness, for all the distinctive lines of human
progress lie outside.

In the mind of the lady of the house is an arrange-
ment of fact and feeling, which is untrue because it is
disproportionate. The first tendency of the incessant
home life is to exaggerate personality. The home is
necessarily a hotbed of personal feeling. There love
grows intense and often morbid ; there any little irrita-
tion frets and wears in the constant pressure like a stone
in one's shoe. The more isolated the home, the more cut
off from the healthy movement of social progress, as in
the lonely farmhouses of New England, the more we
find those intense eccentric characters such as Mary E.

217

THE HOME

Wilkins so perfectly portrays. The main area of the
mind being occupied with a few people and their affairs,
a tendency to monomania appears. The solitary farmer
is least able to escape this domestic pressure, and there-
fore we find these pathological conditions of home life
most in scattered farms.

Human creatures, to keep healthy, mtut mingle with
one another. The house-bound woman cannot; there-
fore she does not maintain a vigorous and growing mind.
Such contact as she has is mainly through church op-
portunities ; and along all such lines as are open to her
she eagerly flocks, finding great relief therein. But
compare the interchange between a group of house-
ladies, and a corresponding group of men — ^their hus-
bands perhaps. Each of these men, touching the world
through a different trade, has an area of his own; from
which he can bring a new outlook to the others. Even if
all are farmers, in which case there is much less breadth
and stimulus in their intercourse, they still have some
connection with the moving world. They seek to meet
at some outside point, the store, the blacksmith's shop,
the railroad station, the post-ofBcc; the social hunger
appeasing itself as best it may with such scraps of the
general social activities as fall to it. But the women,
coming together, have nothing to bring each other but

218

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

personalities. Some slight variation in each case per-
haps, a little difference in receipts for sponge-cake, cures
for measles, patterns for clothes, or stitches for fancy-
work. (Oh, poor, poor lives! where fancy has no work
but in stitches, and no play at all!)

The more extended and well-supplied house merely
gives its lady a more extended supply of topics of the
same nature. She may discuss candle-shades instead of
bed-quilts, " entries " instead of " emptin's '* ; ferns for
the table instead of " yarbs " for the garret ; but the
distinction is not vital. It is still the lady prattling of
her circumambient house, as snails might (possibly do!)
dilate upon the merits of their ever-present shells. The
limitations of the house as an area for a human life
are most baldly dreary and crippling in the lower grades,
the great majority of cases, where the housewife toils,
not yet become the lady of the house. Here you see
grinding work, and endless grey monotony. Here are
premature age, wasting disease, and early death. If a
series of photographs could be made of the working
housewives in our country districts, with some personal
account of the " poor health " which is the main topic of
their infrequent talk ; we should get a vivid idea of the
condition of this grade of house-bound life.

The lady is in a different class, and open to a differ-

S19

THE HOME

ent danger. She is not worn out by oTerwork, but
weakened by idleness. She is not starved and stunted
by the hopeless lack of expression, but is, on the contrary,
distorted by a senseless profusion of expression. There
is pathos even to tears in the perforated cardboard fly-
traps dangling from the gaudy hanging lamp in the
farmhouse parlour ; the little weazened, withered blossom
of beauty thrust forth from the smothered life below.
There is no pathos, rather a repulsive horror, in the mass
of freakish ornament on waUs, floors, chairs, and tables,
on specially contrived articles of furniture, on her own
body and the helpless bodies of her little ones, which
marks the unhealthy riot of expression of the overfed
and underworked lady of the house.

Every animal want is met, save those of air and
exercise, though nowadays we let her out enough to meet
those, if she will do it in games and athletic sports —
anything that has not, as Veblen puts it, ^^ the slightest
taint of utility.*' She is a far more vigorous lady
physically, than ever before. Also, nowadays, we
educate her; in the sense of a large supply of abstract
information. We charge her battery with every stim-
ulating influence diuing youth ; and then we expect her
to discharge the swelling current in the same peaceful
circuit which contented her great-grandmother! This

220

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE
gives us one of the most agonising spectacles of modem
times.

Here is a creature, inheriting the wide reach of the
modem mind; that socially-developed mind begotten of
centuries of broadest human intercourse; and, in our
later years of diffused education, rapid transit, and
dizzying spread of industrial processes, increasing its
range and intensity with eadi generation. This
tremendous engine, the healthy use of which requires
contact with the whole field of social stimulus to keep
up its supplies, and the whole field of social activity for
free discharge, we expect to find peaceful expression in
its own single house. There is of course a margin of
escape — ^there must be.

In earlier decades the suppressed activity of this
growing creature either still found vent in some refined
forms of household industry, as in the exquisite em-
broideries of our grandmothers, or frankly boiled over
in " society." The insatiate passion of woman for
** society *' has puzzled her unthinking mate. He had
society, the real society of large human activities ; but he
saw no reason why she should want any. She ought to
be content at home^ in the unbroken circle of the family.
While the real labours of the house held her therein she
stayed, content or not ; but, free of those, she has reached

SSI

THE HOME

out widely In such planes as were open to her, for social
contact. As women, any number of women, failed to
furnish any other stimulus than that she was already
overfilled with — ^they being each and all mere ladies of
houses — she was naturally more attracted to the more
humanly developed creature, man.

Man's power, his charm, for woman is far more than
that of sex. It is the all-inclusive vital force of human
life — of real social development. She has hung around
him as devotedly as the cripple tags the athlete. When
women have their own field of legitimate social ac-
tivity, they retain their admiration for really noble
manhood, but the ^^ anybody. Good Lord ! '' petition is
lost forever. A hint is perhaps suggested here, as to the
world-old charm for women, of the priest and soldier.
Both are forms of very wide social service — detached,
impersonal, giving up life to the good of the whole —
infinitely removed from the close clinging shadow of the
house !

In our immediate time the progress of industry has cot
the lady off from even her embroidery. Man, alert and
inventive, follows her few remaining industries relent-
lessly, and grabs them from her, away from the house,
into the mill and shop where they belong. But she, with
ever idler hands, must stay behind. He will furmsh her

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE
with everything her heart can wish — ^but she must stay
right where she is and swallow it.

** Lady Lovet Lady Lovet wilt thou he miM?
Thou 9haU neither waeh dUhee, nor yet feed the eufinel
But sit on a euihUm and eew a gold team
And feed upon etrawherriee, eugar, and cream t "

This amiable programme, so exquisitely ludicrous,
when offered to the world's most inherently industrious
worker, becomes as exquisitely cruel when applied. The
physical energies of the mother — ^an enormous fund — de-
nied natural expression in bodily exertion, work morbidly
in manifold disease. The social energies, boundless, re-
sistless, with which she is brought more in contact every
year, denied natural expression in world-service, work
morbidly inside the painfully inadequate limits of the
house.

Here we have the simple explanation of that unrea-
sonable excess which characterises the lady of the
house. The amount of wealth this amiable prisoner can
consume in fanciful caprices is practically unlimited.
Her clothing and ornament is a study in itself. Start
any crazy fad or fashion in this field, and off goes the
flood of self-indulgence, the craving for ^^ expression,''
absrdity topping extravagance. There is noth-

228

THE HOME
ing to check it save the collapse of the source of sup-
plies.

A modem ^^ captain of industry " has a brain so so-
cially developed as to require for its proper area of ex-
pression an enormous range of social service. He gets it.
He develops great systems of transportation, elaborate
processes of manufacture, complex legislation or financial
manoeuvres. Without reference to his purpose, to the
money he may acquire, or the relative good or evil of his
methods, the point to be noted is that he is exercising his
full personal capacity.

His sister, his wife, has a similar possibility of brain
activity, and practically no provision for its exercise.
So great is the growth, so tremendous the pressure of live
brains against dead conditions, that in our current life
of to-day we find more and more women pouring wildly
out into any and every form of combination and action,
good, bad, and indifferent. The church sewing circle,
fair, and donation party no longer satisfy her. The re-
ception, dinner, ball, and musicale no longer satisfy her.
Even the splendid freedom of physical exercise no longer
satisfies her. More and more the necessity for full and
legitimate social activity makes itself felt ; and more and
more she is coming out of the house to take her rightful
place in the world.

SS4

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

Not easfly is this accomplished, not cheaply and
safely. She is breaking loose from the hardest shell that
ever held immortal seed. She is held from within by
every hardened layer of untouched instinct which has
accumulated through the centuries; and she is opposed
from without by such mountain ranges of prejudice as
would be insurmountable if prejudice were made of any-
thing real.

The obsequious terror of a child, cowed by the nurse's
bugaboo, is more reasonable than our docile acquiescence
in the bonds of prejudice. It is pleasantly funny,
knowing the real freedom so easily possible, to see a
strong, full-grown woman solemnly state that she cannot
pass the wall of cloudy grandeur with Mrs. Grundy for
gate-keeper, that seems to hem her in so solidly. First one
and then another reaches out a courageous hand against
this towering barricade, touches it, shakes it, finds it not
fact at all, but merely feeling — and passes calmly
through. There is really nothing to prevent the woman
of to-day from coming out of her old shell ; and there is
much to injure her, if she stays in.

The widespread nervous disorders among our leisure-
class women are mainly traceable to this unchanging
mould, which presses ever more cruelly upon the growing
life. Health and happiness depend on smooth fulfil-

2S5

THE HOME

ment of function, and the functional ability of a modern
woman can by no means be exercised in this ancient
coop.

The effect of the lady of the house upon her
husband is worth special study. He thinks he likes that
kind of woman, he stoutly refuses to consider any other
kind ; and yet his very general discontent in her society
has been the theme of all observers for all time. In our
time it has reached such prominence as to be conunented
upon even in that first brief halcyon period, the ** honey-
moon." Punch had a piteous cartoon of a new-mar-
ried pair, sitting bored and weary on the beach, diuing
their wedding journey. " Don't you wish some friend
would come along?" said she. "Yes," he answered —
" or even an enemy ! "

Men have accepted the insufficiencies and disagreeable-
nesses of " female society " as being due to " the disabil-
ities of sex." They are not, being really due to the dis-
ability of the house-bound. Love may lead a man to
" marry his housekeeper,*' and we condemn the misalli-
ance; but he makes a housekeeper of his wife without
criticism. The misalliance is still there.

A man, a healthy, well-placed man, has his position
in the world and in the home, and finds happiness in
both. He loves his wife, she meets his requirements as a

226

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

husband, and he expects nothing more of her. His other
requirements he meets in other ways. That she cannot
give him this, that, and the other form of companionship,
exercise, gratification, is no ground of blame ; the world
outside does that. So the man goes smoothly on, and
when the woman is uncertain, capricious, exacting, he
lays it to her being a woman, and lets it go at that.

But she, for all field of exertion, has but this house;
for all kinds of companionship, this husband. He stands
between her and the world, he has elected to represent it
to her, to be " all the world *' to her. Now, no man that
ever lived, no series or combination of husbands that
widowhood or polyandry ever achieved can be equivalent
to the world. The man needs the wife and has her —
needs the world and has it. The woman needs the hus-
band — ^and has him ; needs the world — and there is the
husband instead. He stands between her and the world,
with the best of intentions, doubtless ; but a poor substi-
tute for full human life.

** What else should she want? " he inquires in genuine
amazement. ^^ I love her, I am kind to her, I provide
a good home for her — she has her children and she has
me — ^what else should she want? '*

What else does he want? He has her — the home and
the children — does that suffice him? He wants also the

227

THE HOME

human world to move freely in, to act fu&y in, to live
widely in, (md so does she.

And because she cannot have it, because he stands
there in its stead, she demands of him the satisfaction of
all these thwarted human instincts. She does not know
what ails her. She thinks he does not love her enough;
that if he only loved her enough, stayed with her enough,
she would be satisfied. No man can sit down and love a
woman eighteen hours a day, not actively. He does
love her, all the time, in a perfectly reasonable way, but
he has something else to do.

He loves her for good and all ; it is in the bank, to draw
on for the rest of Hf e, a steady, unfailing supply ; but
she wants to see it and hear it and feel it all the time, like
the miser of old who ^* made a bath of his gold and rolled
in it."

The most glaring type of this unfortunate state of
mind in recent fiction is that of the morbid Marna in the
" Confessions of a Wife '* — a vivid expression of what it
is to be a highly-concentrated, double-distilled wife — and
nothing elsel No shadow of interest had she in life ex-
cept this man ; no duty, no pleasure, no use, no ambition,
no religion, no business — ^nothing whatever but one era-
bodied demand for her Man. He was indeed all the world
to her — ^and he didn't Uke it.

S28

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

If the woman was fully developed on the human side
she would cease to be overdeveloped on the feminine side.
If she had her fair share of world-life she would ex-
pect of her husband that he be a satisfactory man, but
not that he be a satisfactory world, which is quite beyond
him. Cannot men see how deeply benefited they would
be by this change, this growth of woman? She would
still be woman, beautiful, faithful, loving; but she
would not be so greedy, either for money or for love.

The lady of the house may be most softly beautiful,
she may be utterly devoted, she may be unutterably ap-
pealing; but all her centuries of cherished existence
have but brought us to PuncVa ** Advice to Those About
to Marry'': "Don't!"

The world's incessant complaint of marriage, mock-
ery of marriage, resistance, outbreak, and default, gives
heavy proof that that great human institution has seri-
ous defects. The blame has generally been laid on man.
Suppose we now examine the other fact, the equal factor,
and see if there is not some essential error in her position.
This might furnish a wide field of study in the leisure
hours of The Lady of the House.

229

THE CHILD AT HOME

THERE are upon earth many millions of peo-
ple — ^most of them children. Mankind has
been continuous upon earth for millions of
years; children have been equally continuous. Chil-
dren constitute a permanent class, the largest class in
the population. There are men, there are women, there
are children, and the children outnumber the adults by
three to two.

In the order of nature, all things give way before the
laws and processes of reproduction; the individual is
sacrificed to the race. Natural forces, working through
the unconscious submission of the animal, tend steadily
to improve a species through its young.

Social forces, working through our conscious system
of education, tend to improve our species through its
young. Humanity is developed age after age through a
gradual improvement in its children ; and since we have
seen this and learned somewhat to assist nature by art,
humanity develops more quickly and smoothly.

Every generation brings us more close to recognition

SSO

THE CHILD AT HOME

of this great basic law, finds us more willing to follow
nature's principle and bend all our energies to the best
development of the child. We early learned to multiply
our power and wisdom by transmission through speech,
and, applying that process to the child, we taught him
what we knew, saving to humanity millennial periods of
evolution by this conscious short-cut through education.

Nature's way of teaching is a very crude one — ^mere
wholesale capital punishment. She kills off the erring
without explanation. They die without knowing what
for, and the survivors don't know, either. We, by edu-
cation, markedly assist nature, transmitting quick knowl-
edge from mouth to mouth, as well as slow tendency
from generation to generation. More and more we learn
to collect race-improvement and transmit It to the child,
the most swift and easy method of social progress. To-
day, more than ever before, are our best minds giving
attention to this vital problem — ^how to make better
people. How to make better bodies and better minds,
better tendencies, better habits, better ideas — ^this is the
study of the modem educator.

Slowly we have learned that the best methods of edu-
cation are more in modifying influence than in trans-
mitted facts ; that, as the proverb puts it, " example Is
better than precept." The modifying influences of social

SSI

THE HOME

environment have deeper and surer effect on the human
race than any others, and that effect is strongest on the
young. Therefore, we attach great importance to what
we call the ^^ bringing up '' of children, and we are right.
The education of the little child, through the influences
of its early enyironment, is the most important process of
human life.

Whatever progress we make in art and science, in
manufacture and commerce, is of no permanent impor-
tance unless it modifies humanity for the better. That a
race of apes should live by agriculture, manufacture,
and commerce is inconceivable. They would cease to be
apes by so living; but, if they could^ those processes
would be of no value, the product being only apes. We
are here to grow, to become a higher and better kind of
people. Every process of life is valuable in proportion
to its contributing to our improvement, and the procecs
that most contributes to our improvement is the most
important of human life. That process is the education
of the child, and that education includes all the influ-
ences which reach him, the active efforts of parent and
teacher, the unconscious influence of all associates, and
the passive effect of the physical environment.

All these forces, during the most impressionable years
of childhood, and most of them during the whole period,

232

THE CHILD AT HOME
Bure centered in the home. The home is by all means the
most active factor in the education of the child. This
we know well. This we believe devoutly. This we accept
without reservation or inquiry, seeing the power of home
influences, and never presuming to question their merit*

In our general contented home-worship we seem to
think that a home — ^any home — ^is in itself competent to
do all that is necessary for the right rearing of children.
Or, if we discriminate at all, if we dare admit by referring
to ** a good home *' that there are bad ones — ^we then
hold all the more firmly that the usual type of ** a good
home *' is the perfect environment for a child. If this
dogma is questioned, our only alternative is to contrast
the state of the child without a home to that of the child
with one. The orphan, the foundling, the neglected
child of the street is contrasted with the well-fed and
comfortably clothed darling of the household, and we
relapse into our profound conviction that the home in
all right.

Again the reader is asked to put screws on the feelings
and use the reason for a little while. Let us examine both
the child and the home, with new eyes, seeing eyes, and
consider if there is no room for improvement. And first,
to soothe the ruffled spirit and quiet alarm, let it be here
stated in good set terms that the author does NOT advo*

SSS

THE HOME

cate ^* separating the child from the mother/' or depriv-
ing it of the home. Mother and child can never be
** separated " in any such sense as these unreasoning ter-
rors suggest. The child has as much right to the home
as anyone — more, for it was originated for his good.
The point raised is, whether the home, as it now is, is the
best and only environment for children, and, further,
whether the home as an environment for children cannot
be improved.

What is a child? The young of the human spedes.
First, a young animal, whose physical life must be con-
served and brought to full development. Then, a young
human, whose psychical life, the human life, must be
similarly cared for.

How does the home stand as regards either branch of
development? In what way is it specifically prepared
for the use, enjoyment, and benefit of a duld? First,
as to the structure of the thing, the house. We build
houses for ourselves, modifying them somewhat accord-
ing to climate, position, and so on. How do we modify
them for children ? What is there in the make-up of any
ordinary house designed to please, instruct, educate, and
generally benefit a child? In so far as he shares our own
physical needs for shelter and convenience he is bene-
fited; but, as a child, with his own specific necessities,

2S4

THE CHILD AT HOME
desires, and limitations, what has the architect planned
for the child — ^what have the mason and carpenter built
for the child? Is there anything in the size and pro-
portion, the material, the internal arrangement, the finish
and decoration, to hint of the existence of children on
earth?

The most that we find, in the most favoured houses, is
** a sunny nursery." In one home of a thousand we
find one room out of a dozen planned for children. What
sort of an allowance is this for the largest class of citi-
zens? Suppose our homes had, among the more ex-
pensive ones, one room for the adult family to flock into,
and all the rest was built and arranged for children!
We should think ourselves somewhat neglected in such
an arrangement. But we are not as numerous as our
children, nor as important; and, in any case, the home
belongs to the child ; he is the cause of its being ; it is for
him, hypothetically, that we marry and start a home.

What, then, is the explanation of this lack of special
provision for the real founder of the home? This utter
unsuitability of the house to the child, and the child to
the house, finds its crowning expression in our cities,
where house-owners refuse to let their houses to families
with children ! What are houses for? What are homes
for? For children, first, last, and always ! How, then,

235

THE HOME

have we come to this vanishing point of absurdity?
What paradoxical gulf stretches between these houses
where " no children need apply '* and the rest of the
houses. There is no risible difference in their plans and
construction. No houses are built for children ; and these
particular landlords simply accent the fact, and try to
limit the use of the house to the persons for whom it was
intended — ^the adults.

What is there in the presence of children in a house to
alarm the owner? " They are so destructive," he will
tell you ; " they are mischievous, they are noisy. Other
tenants object to them. They injure the house when old
enough to run about, and squall objectionably when
babies." All this is true enough. Most babies are a source
of distress to their immediate neighbours because of their
painful wailing, and most little children continue to cause
distress by their noise in play and shrieks under punish-
ment. Is all this outcry necessary? Must the poor
baby suffer by night and day; must the small child
bang and yell, and must it be punished so frequently?
Why is the process of getting acclimated to the world
so difficult and agonising? Is there really no way that
the experience of all the ages may be turned to account
to facilitate the first years of a child's life?

Our behaviour to the child rests on several assumptions

236

THE CHILD AT HOME
which are, at least, not proven. We assume that he has
to be sick. We assume that he has to be naughty. We
assiune that life is hard and unpleasant, anyway, and
that, the sooner he learns this and gets broken into it, the
better. There is no more reason why a child should be
sick than a calf or colt. Infancy is tender, and needs
care, but it is not a disease. The Egyptian mother loves
her baby, no doubt, though it goes blind through her
ignorance and neglect — she knows nothing of ophthal-
mia, and lets the flies crawl over its helpless face, even
while she loves it. We scorn and pity her ignorance, but
we accept the colic, disorders of teething, and all the
train of ^^ preventable diseases " which kill off our babies,
precisely as she accepts ophthalmia.

We have not learned yet how to make a baby the
happy, ccmtented, smoothly developing little animal that
he should be. Some of us do better than others, but the
knowledge of one is no gain to the rest, being confined to
one family. Slowly the wider human care, the larger
love, the broader knowledge, of doctor, nurse, and teacher
are penetrating the innermost fortress of the home, and
teaching the mother how to care for the child. The
home did not teach her, and never would. In the un-
touched homes of ancient Eastern races, countless gen-
erations of mothers transmit the same traditional mis«

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THE HOME

takes, love in the same blind way, and weep the same loss
as unprofitably as they did ten thousand years ago.

In the homes of civilised races, where the light of
social progress is most fully felt, we see the most im-
provement ; but even here the pressure of growing knowl-
edge is still combated by the jealous arrogance of the
untaught mother, and the measureless inertia of the
home.

In plain fact, what does the average home offer to the
newcomer, the utterly defenceless baby, the all-important
Coming Generation? See physical conditions first. To
what sort of world is the new soul introduced? To a
place built and furnished for several mixed and con-
flicting industries ; not to a place planned for babies —
aired, lighted, heated, coloured, and kept quiet to suit
the young brain and body ; but a building meant for a
number of grown people to cook in, sweep and dust in,
wash and iron in, cut and sew in, eat and wash dishes in,
see their friends in, dress, undress, and sleep in ; and in-
cidentally, in the cracks and crevices of all these varied
goings on, to " bring up " children in.

In that very small percentage of families where a
nursery is arranged for children, and a nurse and a
nursery-governess do deputy service for the always
alleged ^^ mother's care," we find some provision made

S38

THE CHILD AT HOME

for children; but of what sort? This deputy is inferior
to the mother, save in a certain rule-of -thumb experience
which enables her to ^^ manage children." Her knowl-
edge of infant hygiene is not much greater, nor of
infant psychology. Look, for instance, at the babies of
our richer classes, as we see them continually in the
streets and parks. Our only alternative from the home
is the street, we having as yet no place for our babies.
If near a park so much the better, but in general the
sidewalk must serve, for rich or poor.

As one immediate physical condition, examine the dress
of these babies and young children ; this among parents
of wealth, and, presumably, intelligence. See the baby
in the perambulator so rolled and bedded in, so tucked
and strapped, that he cannot move anything but perhaps
a stiffly projecting arm. Think of an adult cocooned in
this manner, unable to roll, stir, turn, in any way relieve
the pressure or change the attitude. And, when you
have considered the sensations of a tough and patient
adult frame, think further of those of a soft, tender,
active, and impatient baby body.

The dress of a baby or little child bears no relation
to his immediate comfort or to the needs of his incessant
growth. Among our wisest parents there is to-day a
new custom, happily increasing, of barefoot freedom, of

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THE HOME

dirt-proof overalls, of a chance for beautiful, uncoiiAcious
growth; but this does not reach the vast majority of
suffering little ones. It does not spread because of the
seclusion and irresponsible dominance of the separate
home; and further — ^because of the low-grade intel-
ligence of the home-bound mother.

She whose condition of arrested development makes
her unquestioningly submit to the distortion, constriction,
weight, and profusion of fashion in clothing for her own
body, is not likely to show much sense in dressing a
child. Beautiful fabrics, rich textures, expensive adorn-
ments, 3he heaps upon it. She wishes it to look pretty,
according to her barbaric taste; and she disfigures the
grave, sweet beauty of a baby face, the lovely moving
curves of the little body, with heavy masses of stiff
cloth, starched frippery, and huge, nodding, gaily
decorated hats that would please an Ashantee warrior.

If some cartoonist would give us a copy of the Sistine
Mother and Child in the costume of our mothers and
children, showing those immortal cherub faces blinking
obliquely from under flopping hat brims and rich
plumes, perhaps we might in sudden shocked perception
see with what coarse irreverence we disfigure our blessed
little ones.

The child does not find in the home any assurance of

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THE CHILD AT HOME
health, beauty, or free growth. He, and especially she,
must wear the dainty garments on which our misguided
mother love so wastef ully lavishes itself ; and must then
be restricted in all natural exercise lest they be torn or
soiled. To dress a little child so that he may be perfectly
comfortable, and grow in absolute freedom, has not oc-
curred to the home-bound mother.

Neither has she learned how to feed it. If the home
is the best place for children, if the home is the best place
for the preparation of food, would it not seem as if in
all these long, long years we might have evolved some
system of feeding little children so as to keep them at
least alive — ^to say nothing of their being healthy?

The animal mother, guided by her unspoiled instinct,
does manage to feed her young, and to teach it how to
feed itself. The human mother, long since cut off from
that poor primitive guidance, and proudly refusing to
put knowledge in its place, feeds the baby in accordance
with her revered domestic traditions, and calls in the
doctor to remedy her mistakes. One man, in Buffalo,
has recently saved fifteen hundred babies in a year,
lowering the annual death rate by that amount, by pub-
lic distribution of directions for preparing milk. He was
not a mother. He was not shut up in a home. He
studied and he taught in the light of public progress,

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THE HOME
in a growing world ; and succeeded in filtering some of
this saving knowledge into the darkness of fifteen hun-
dred homes.

The average child is not fed properly; and there is
nothing in the home to teach the mother how. She must
learn outside, but she is not willing to. She still believes,
and her husband with her, in the infallible power of ^ a
mother's love " and " a mother's care " ; and our babies
are buried by thousands and thousands without our
learning anything by the continual sacrifice. This is
owing to the isolation of the home. If there were any
general knowledge, general custom, association, com-
parison ; if mothers considered their enormous responsi-
bility as a class, instead of merely as individuals, this
could not be. Knowledge and experience have to be
gathered by wide and prolonged study ; they do not come
by an infinite repetition of the same private experi"
ments.

We have to-day the first stirring of this great multi-
tude of separately concealed experimenters toward that
association and exchange of view, that carefully recorded
observation, that reasonable study, which are necessary
for any human advance. Our mothers are beginning to
come out of their isolation into normal human contact ; to
take that first step toward wisdom — ^the acknowledgment

S43

THE CHILD AT HOME
of ignorance; and to studj what little is known of this
new science, Child-culture.

But it is only a beginning, very scant and small, and
ridiculed unmercifully by the great slow dead-weight of
the majority. The position of the satirist of modem
motherhood is a safe and easy one. To ally one's self
with the great mass of present humanity, and the far
greater mass of the past, of aU our hoary and revered
traditions, and to direct this combined weight against
the first movement of a new idea — ^this is an old game.
Humanity has thus resisted every step of its own
progress; but, though it makes that progress difficult
and slow, it cannot wholly prevent it.

If the home and the home-bound mother do not ensure
right food or clothing for the child, what do they offer
in safety, and in the increasing educational influence
which early em'ironment must have? As to safety — ^the
shelter of the home — ^we have already seen that even
to the adult the home offers no protection from the main
dangers of our time: disease, crime, and fire or other
accident. The child not only shares these common dan-
gers, but is more exposed to them, owing to more abso-
lute confinement to the home and greater susceptibility.
Whatever we suffer from sewer-gas, carbonic dioxide, or
microbes and bacteria, the child suffers more.

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THE HOME

He breathes the dust of our carpets, and eats it if we
do not watch him. ^^ I can't take my eyes off that child
one minute," cries the admiring manmia, ^^ or he'll be sure
to put something in his mouth ! " That a perfectly
clean place might be preparjed for a creeping baby,
where there was nothing whatever he could put in his
mouth, has never occurred to her. The child shares and
more than shares every danger of the home, and further-
more suffers an endless list of accidents peculiar to his
limitations. Even our dull nerves are roused to some
sort of response by the terrible frequency of accidents to
little children.

I have here a number, taken from one newspaper in
one city during one year; not exhaustive daily scrutiny
either; merely a casual collection:

" Mother and Baby Both Badly Burned." A three-
year-old baby this — ^a match, a little night-dress flaming,
struggle, torture, death ! " Choked in Mother's Arms "
is the next one; the divine instinct of Maternity giving a
two-year-old child half a filbert to eat. It was remarked
in the item that the " desolate couple " had lost two other
little ones within two months. It did not state whether
the two others were accidently murdered by a mother's
care.

" Child's Game Proved Fatal " is the next. Three-

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THE CHILD AT HOME
years-old twins were these ; ** playing fire en^ne in the
parlour while their mother prepared the midday meal/'

One climbed on the table and lit a newspaper at a
gas jet» and set fire to the other. It is then related
"Both children cried out, but their mother, thinking they
were only playing, did not hasten to find what was the
matter." " The child died at 3 P. M." is the conclusion.

" Accidentally Killed His Baby " f oUows. The fond
father, holding his two-year-old son on his knee, shot and
killed him with a revolver " which he believed to be
empty."

"Escaping Gas Kills Baby"— "Boy Has Cent in
His Throat " — ^" Insane Mother's Crime " — ^** Drowns
her Eight-year-old Daughter " — and here a doctor says,
" It would be an excellent idea for every family to have a
little book giving briefly prompt antidotes for various
poisons. Physicians know that there are scores of cases
of accidental poisoning never heard of outside the family
concerned. I've had several cases of poisoning by an
accidental dose of chloroform and aconite liniment, and
one woman gave her child muriatic acid that was kept for
cleaning the marbles."

Another "Mother and Child Burned "—" Child
Scratched by a 60-foot Fall" — (this one was saved
by striking several clothes-lines after she fell out of the

245

THE HOME

window) — ^* Kitten was Life Preserver *' — another fall
out of a window, but the duld was holding a kitten, and
her head struck on it — so only the kitten was smashed.

" A Governor's Child badly Hurt »'— ** wifl probably
prove fatal," this was a two-story drop over a staircase;
and shows that it is not only in the homes of the poor
that these things happen. Another " Baby Burned "
follows — ^this poor little one was left strapped into its
carriage, and set fire to by an enterprising little brother.

"Tiny Singer Fell Dead" describes a five-year-old
boy as singing a selection from " Cavalleria Rusticana "
as a means of entertaining a party of young friends—
and burst a blood-vessel in the brain. Then there is a
story of a grisly murder in which a tiny child testifies as
to seeing her father kill her mother; the child was not
hurt — physically. And then a bit of negative evidence
quite striking in its way, describing " The Mother of
Twenty-five Children " and incidentally stating " of
these only three sons and four daughters are now liv-
ing." Seven out of twenty-five does not seem a large
proportion to survive the perils of the home.

These are a few, a very few, instances of extreme
injury and death. They are as nothing to the wide-
spread similar facts we do not hear of ; and as less than
nothing to the list of minor accidents to which little

g46

THE CHILD AT HOME

children are constantly exposed In the shelter of the
home. We bar our windows and gate our stairs in
some cases ; but our principal reliance is on an unending
watchfulness and a system of rigid discipline. ^^ Chil-
dren need constant care ! '' we maintain ; and ** A child
must be taught to mind instantly, for its own protec-
tion." A child is not a self-acting poison or explosive.
If he were in an absolutely safe place he might be
free for long, bright, blessed hours from the glaring
Argus-eyed watchfulness which is so intense an irritant.
Convicts under sentence of death are in their last hours
kept under surveillance like this, lest they take their
own lives. Partly lest the child injure himself among
the many dangers of the home, and partly lest he
injure its frail and costly contents, he grows up under
" constant watching.'' If this is remitted, he " gets
into mischief " very promptly. " Mischief " is our
broad term for the natural interaction of a child and a
home. The inquiry of the young mind, and the activity
of the young body, finding no proper provision made for
them, inevitably fall foul of our complicated utensils,
furniture, and decorations, and what should be a normal
exercise becomes " mischief."

Our chapter of accidents here leads us' to the great
underlying field of education. Say that the child lives

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THE HOME
to grow up, during these wholly home-bound years; in
spite of wrong clothing, wrong feeding, and the many
perils we fatuously call *^ incident to babyhood " (when
they are only incident to our lack of proper provision for
babyhood). If he battles through his infancy and early
childhood successfully, what has he gained from his
early environment in education? What are the main
facts of life, as impressed upon every growing child by
his home surroundings?

The principal fact is eating. This he learns per-
force by seeing his mother spending half her time on
that one business ; by seeing so much house-space given
to it; by the constant arrival of food supplies, meat,
groceries, milk, ice, and the rest; and excursions to get
them. The instincts of early savagery, which every
child has to grow through, are heavily reinforced by the
engrossing food-processes of the home.

They do not necessarily please him or her, either.
The child does not grow up with a burning ambition to
be a cook. Whether the ever-present kitchen business
was run by the mother or by a servant, it was not run
joyously and proudly ; nor was it run in such wise as to
really teach the child the principles of hygiene in food-
values and preparation. If the family is a wealthy one
the child is not allowed in the kitchen perhaps, but is the

THE CHILD AT HOME
more impressed by the complicated machinery of the
dining-room, and that elaborate cult of special ^^ man-
ners " used in this sacred service of the body. Thus
and thus must he eat, and thus handle his utensils ; and
if the years and the tears spent in acquiring these
Eleusinian mysteries make due impression on the fresh
brain tissue, then we may expect to find the human being
more impressed by the art of eating than by any other.

And so we do find him. The children of the kitchen
are differently affected from the children of the dining-
room. These last, of our ^^ upper classes,'' receive the
indelible stamp of the tri-daily ritual, and go through
the rest of life thinking more highly of ^^ table manners "
than of any other line of conduct, for the reason that
they were more incessantly, thoroughly, and importu-
nately taught that code than any other. To handle a
fork properly is insisted upon far more imperatively
than to properly handle a temper.

The principal business of the home being the care of
the body, and this accomplished through these archaic
domestic industries, the unending up-current of young
life, which should so steadily purify and uplift the
world, in every generation is steeped anew in this exag-
geration of physical needs and caprices.

Beyond the overwhelming cares of the table the other

249

THE HOME
home industries involve the care and replenishment of
furniture and clothes. Hour after hour, day after day,
the child sees his mother devoting her entire life to
attendance upon these things — ^the daily cleaning, the
weekly cleaning, the spring and fall cleaning, the sewing

and mending at all times.

These things must be done, by some people, some-
where ; but must they be done by all people, that is by
all women, the people who surround the child, and all the
time? Must the child always associate womanhood with
house-service; and assume, necessarily assume, that the
main business of life is to be clean, well-dressed, and eat
in a proper manner?

If the mother is not herself the house-servant — ^what
else is she? What does the growing brain gather of the
true proportions of life from his dining-room-and-
parlour mamma? Her main care, and talk, is still that
of food and clothes ; and partly that of ** entertainment,"
which means more food and more clothes.

Can we not by one daring burst of effort imagine a
home where there was still the father and mother love,
still the comfort, convenience, and beauty we so enjoy,
still the sweet union of the family group, and yet no
kitchen? Perhaps even, in some remote dream, no din-
ing-room? Where the mother waa a wise, strong, efficient

S50

THE CHILD AT HOME

human being, interested in and working for the progress
of humanity ; and giving to her baby, in these sweet hours
of companionship, some true sense of what life is for and
how it works. No, we cannot imagine it, most of us.
We really cannot. We are so indelibly kitchen-bred, or
dining-room-bred, that mother means cook, or at least
housekeeper, to our minds; and family means dinner-
table.

So grows the child in the home. In the school he
learns something of social values, in the church some-
thing, in the street something ; from his father, who is a
real factor in society, something; but in the home he
learns by inexorably repeated impressions of every day
and hour, that life, this deep, new, thrilling mystery of
life consists mainly of eating and sleeping, of the
making and wearing of clothes. We are irresistibly
reminded of the strange text, " Take no thought of what
ye shall eat or what ye shall drink or wherewithal ye
shall be clothed." A little difficult to follow this com-
mand when mother does nothing else !

261

xin

THE GIRL AT HOME

WHAT is the position of the home toward us
in youth? We have seen something of its
effect upon the child, the wholly helpless
child, who knows no other place or power. We have
seen something of its effect upon the woman in her life-
long confinement there. Between childhood and ma-
turity comes youth; holding what is left of the child's
pure heart and vivid hopes, and what begins to stir of
man's or woman's power. The gain of a race, if there
is a gain, must make itself felt in youth — ^more strength,
more growth, more beauty, a larger conscience, a sounder
judgment, a more efficient wiU.

Each new generation must improve upon its parents;
else the world stands still or retrogrades. In this most
vivid period of life how does the home meet the needs of
the growing soul? The boy largely escapes it. He is
freer, even in childhood ; the more resistant and combat-
ive nature, the greater impatience of pain, makes the
young male far harder to coerce. He sees his father
always going out, and early learns to view the home from

252

THE GIRL AT HOME

a sex-basis, as the proper place for women and children,
and to push incessantly to get away from it.

From boy to boy in the aUuring summer evenings we
hear the cry, " Come on out and have some fun ! ''
Vainly we strive and strive anew to " keep the boys at
home." It cannot be done. Fortunately for us it can-
not be done. We dread to have them leave it, and with
good reason, for well we know there is no proper place
for children in the so long unmothered world ; but even
in danger and temptation they learn something, and
those who struggle through their youth unscathed make
better men than if they had been always softly shielded
in the home.

The world is the real field of action for humanity. So
far humanity has been well-nigh wholly masculine;
and the boy, feeling his humanity, pushes out into his
natural field, the world. He learns and learns, from
contact with his kind. He learns about all sorts
of machinery, all manner of trades and businesses. He
has companions above him and below him and beside him,
the wide human contact in which we grow so rapidly.
If he is in the city he knows the city, if he is in the
country he knows the country, far more fully than his
sister. A thousand influences reach him that never come
to her, formative influences, good and bad, that modify

ass

THE HOME
character. He has far less of tutelage, espionage, re-
straint ; he has more freedom by daylight, and he alone
has any freedom after dark. All the sweet, mysterious
voices of the night, the rich, soft whisperings of fra-
grant summer, when the moon talks and the young soul
answers; the glittering, keen silence of winter nights,
when between blue-black star-pointed space and the level
shine of the snow stands but one living thing — ^your-
self — all this is cut off from the girl. The real intimacy
with nature comes to the soul alone, and the poor, over-
handled girl soul never has it.

In some few cases, isolated and enviable, she may have
this common human privilege, but not enough to count.
She must be guarded in the only place of safety, the
home. Guarded from what? From men. From the
womanless men who may be prowling about while all
women stay at home. The home is safe because women
are there. Out of doors is unsafe because women are not
there. If women were there, everywhere, in the world
which belongs to them as much as to men, then every-
where would be safe. We try to make the women safe
in the home, and keep them there; to make the world
safe for women and children has not occurred to us. So
the boy grows, in the world as far as he can reach it,
and the girl does not grow equally, being confined to

254

THE GIRL AT HOME
the home. In very recent years, within one scant
century, we are letting the girls go to school, even to
college. They pour out into the larger field and fill it
at once. Their human faculties have some chance to
grow as well as the over-emphasised feminine ones; and
in our schools and colleges youth of both sexes finds the
room, stimulus, and exercise it could not find at home.

The boy who does not go to college goes to business,
to work in some way. To find an able-bodied intelligent
boy in a home between breakfast and supper would argue
a broken leg. But girls we find by thousands and
thousands ; " helping mother," if mother does the work ;
and if there are servants to do the work, the girl does —
what?

What is the occupation of the daughter of the house?
Let us suppose her to be healthy. Let us suppose her to
have a fair share of ability and education. She has no
longer the school or the college, she has only the home.
Not that she is physically confined there. She may go
out by daylight, giving careful account of her steps, and
visit other girls in their homes. She may receive visits,
both from girls and boys; and she may go out con-
tinually to all manner of entertainments. Perhaps she
28 expected to dust the parlour, to arrange the flowers,
to ^^ keep up her music." She has enough to eat, enough

255

THE HOME

and more than enough to wear; but what exercise has
she for body or brain? Perhaps in games and dances
she keeps her body active — ^but what sort of occupation
is that for a young human creature of this century, a
creature of power? The young woman has the same
race inheritance of ability, the same large brain-growth,
as the man. The physical improvement of our times is
reflected in them too; fine stalwart girls we see, taU,
straight, broad-shouldered. She has had, in specific
education, the same mental training as the boy.

How would her brother be content with a day's work
of dusting the parlour and arranging the flowers; of
calling and being called on? Amusement is good, some-
times necessary; best and most necessary to the tired,
unhappy, and overworked. But youth — ^healthy, happy,
and vigorous, full of the press of unused power and the
accumulating ambition of all the centuries — ^why should
youth waste its splendour in such unsatisfying ways?

If you ask the father, he will merely say that it is the
proper position for a girl ; he is " able to support her,"
she does not ^^ have to work," she can amuse herself, and
as for a field for her abilities — she will find that in her
own home when she is married. Ask her mother — ^and she
will tell you, making a sad confession all unknowingly
— ^** let her enjoy herself now ; she will have care enough

S66

THE GIRL AT HOME

later." There is a tadt agreement that girk shall have
all the ^ good time '' possible while they are girls, that
they may have it to remember ! Does this ** good time ^
satisfy the girl? Is she happy in her father's home,
just passing the time till she moves into her husband's?

Sometimes she is. Her education has been strong to
make her so. The home atmosphere of predominant
clothes and food has been about her from the cradle, and
she still has clothes and food, and may elaborate them
¥rithout limit. She may devote as much time to the
adornment of the table as she wishes ; and if her inclina-
tion take her also to the kitchen, perhaps even to the
cooking school, that is more than well. She may also
devote herself to the parlour and its adornment; but
most naturally of all to the adornment of her own young
body — ^all these are proper functions of the home. She
may love and serve her immediate dear ones also, to any
extent ; that is the basic principle of it all, that is occupa*
tion enough for any girl. Yes, there is occupation
enough as far as filling time goes; but how if it does
not satisfy? How if the girl wants something else to
do — something definite, something developing?

This is deprecated by the family. " Work " is held
by all to be a thing no mortal soul should do unless com-
pelled by want. We speak sadly, tenderly, of the poor

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THE HOME

girl whose father died and left her unprovided for,
wherefore ** she had to work." We have not learned to
see that some kind of work is necessary to all human
creatures to use their powers ; not mere tread-mill repeti-
tion of small, useless things, but such range of action as
shall exercise all the faculties. And least of all have we
learned to see that a human soul, to be healthy, must love
and care for more than its own blood relations.

What the girl, as a normal human being, wants is full
exercise in large social relation; things to think about,
feel, and do, which do not in any way concern the home.
Race-babyhood may be content at home — ^it was first
made for babies. But as we grow up into our modem
human range of power, no home can or ought to content
us. We need not, therefore, cease to love it, need not
neglect or ignore it. We simply need something more.
That is the great lack which keeps girlhood unsatisfied ;
the call of the human soul for its full field of action, the
world. We try to meet this lack by a surfeit of supplies
for lower needs.

Since we first began to force upon our girl baby's
astonished and resisting brain the fact that she was a
girl ; since we curbed her liberty by clothing and orna-
ment calculated only to emphasise the fact of sex, and by
restrictions of decorum based upon the same precocious

268

THE GIRL AT HOME

distinction, we have never relaxed the pressure. As if
we feared that there might be some mistake, that she was
not really a girl but would grow up a boy if we looked
the other way, we diligently strove to enforce and in-
crease her femininity by every possible means. So by
the time her womanhood does come it finds every encour-
agement, and the humanhood which should predominate
we have restricted and forbidden. Moreover, whatever
of real humanness she does manifest we persist in regard*
ing as feminine.

For instance, the girl wants friends, social contact.
She cannot satisfy this want in normal lines of work,
in the natural contact of the busy world, so she tries
to meet it on the one plane allowed — ^in what we call
" Society." Her own life being starved, she seeks to
touch other lives as far and fast as possible. Next to
doing things one's self is the association with others who
can do them. So the girl reaches out for friends.
Women friends can give her little ; their lives are empty
as her own, their talk is of the same worn themes —
their point of view either the kitchen or the parlour.
Therefore she finds most good in men friends ; they are
human, they are doing something. All this is set down
to mere feminine " desire to attract " ; we expect it, and
we provide for it. Our ** social " machinery is largely

259

THE HOME
devoted to ^^ bringing young people together " ; not in
any common work, in large human interests, but in such
decorated idleness, with music, perfume, and dance, as
shall best minister to the only forces we are willing to
promote.

Is the girl satisfied? Is it really what she wants,
all she wants? If she were a Circassian slave, perhaps
it would do. For the daughter of free, active, intel-
ligent, modem America it does not do ; and therefore our
girls in ever-increasing numbers are leaving home. It
is not that they do not love their homes; not that they
do not want homes of their own in due season ; it is the
protest of every healthy human soul against the-home-
and-nothing-else.

Our poorer girls are going into mills and shops, our
richer ones into arts and professions, or some educational
and philanthropic work. We oppose this proof of racial
growth and vitality by various economic fallacies about
" taking the bread out of other women's mouths " — ^and
in especial claim that it is " competing with men,"
" lowering wages " and the like. We talk also, in the
same breath, or the next one, about ^^ the Grod-given
right to work " — ^and know not what we mean by that
great phrase.

To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work

THE GIRL AT HOME
to the full capacity of one's powers is necessary for
human development. It is no benefit to a human being
to keep him, or her, in down-wrapped idleness, it is a
gross injury. If a man could afford to put daughters
and wife to bed and have them fed and washed like
babies, would that be a kindness? ^^They do not
have to walk ! " he might say. Yes, they do have to, else
would their muscles weaken and shrink, and beauty and
health disappear. For the health and beauty of the
body it must have full exercise. For the health and
beauty of the mind it must have full exercise. No nor*
mal human mind can find full exercise in dusting the
parlour and arranging the flowers; no, nor in twelve
hours of nerve-exhaustion in the kitchen. Exhaustion is
not exercise.

" But they are free to study — to read, to improve their
minds!" we protest. Minds are not vats to be filled
eternally with more and ever more supplies. It is tM^,
large, free, sufficient use that the mind requires, not
mere information. Our college girls have vast supplies
of knowledge ; how can they use it in the home? Could
a college boy apply his education appropriately to
" keeping house " — ^and, if not, how can the girl? Full
use of one's best faculties — ^this is health and happiness
for both man and woman.

THE HOME

But how about those other people's wages? — ^will be
urged. Productive labour adds to the wealth of the
world, it does not take away. If wealth were a fixed
quantity, shared carefully among a lot of struggling
beggars, then every new beggar would decrease the
other's share.

To work is to give^ not to beg. Every worker adds
to the world's wealth, increases everyone's share. Of
course there are people whose " work " is not of value to
anyone ; who simply use their power and skill to get other
people's money away from them; the less of these the
better. That is not productive labour. But so long as
we see to it that the work we do is worth more than the
pay we get, our consciences may be clean ; we give to the
world and rob no one. As to the immediate facts that
may be alleged, ** overcrowded labour market," ** over-
production," and such bugaboos, these are only facts
as watered stock and stolen franchises are facts; not
economic laws, but criminal practices. A temporary
superficial error in economic conduct need not blind us to
permanent basic truth, and the truth which concerns us
here is that a human creature must work for the health
and power and pleasure of it; and that all good work
enriches the world.

So the girl need not stay at home and content her soul

268

THE GIRL AT HOME

with chocolate drops lest some other girl lose bread.
She may butter that bread and share the confections, by
her labour, if it be productive. And by wise working
she may learn to see how unwise and how unnecessary
are the very conditions which now hold her back. At
present she is generally held back. Her father will not
allow her to work. Her mother needs her at home. So
she stays a while longer. If she marries, she passes out
of this chapter, becoming, without let or change, ^^ the
lady of the house." If she does not marry, what
then? What has father or mother, sister or brother,
to offer to the unmarried woman? What is the home
to her who has no " home of her own " ?

The wife and mother has a real base in her home:
distorted and overgrown though it may have become,
away in at the centre lies the everlasting founder — ^in
the little child. Unnecessary as are the mother's labours
now, they were once necessary, they have a base of
underlying truth. But what real place has a grown
woman of twenty-five and upwards in anyone's else
home? She is not a child, and not a mother. The
initial reason for being at home is not there. What
business has she in it? The claim of filial devotion is
usually advanced to meet this question. Her parents
need her. And here comes out in glaring colours the

S63

THE HOME

distinction between girl and boy, between man's and
woman's labour.

Whatever of filial gratitude, love, and service is owed
to the parent is equally owed by boy and girl. If there
is a difference it should be on the boy's side, as he is more
trouble when little and less assistance in the house when
big. Now, what is the accepted duty of the boy to the
parents, when they are old, feeble, sick, or poor? First,
to maintain them, that is, to provide for them the neces-
saries of life and as much more as he can compass.
Then, to procure for them service and nursing, if need
be. Also himself to bestow affection and respect, and
such part of his time as he can spare from the labour
required to maintain them. This labour he performs
like a civilised man, by the service of other people in
some specialised industry ; and his ability to care for his
parents is measured by his ability to perform that larger
service.

What is the accepted duty of the girl to the parents
in like case? She is required to stay at home and wait
upon them with her own hands, serve them personally,
nurse them personally, give all her time and strength to
them, and this in the old, old uncivilised way, with the
best of intentions, but a degree of ability measured by
the lowest of averages.

264

THE GIRL AT HOME

It is the duty of the child to care for the infirm parent
— ^that is not questioned; but how? Why, in one way,
by one child, and in so different a way by another?
The duty is precisely the same; why is the manner of
fulfilling it so different? If the sick and aged mother
has a capable son to support her, he provides for her a
house, clothing, food, a nurse, and a servant. If she
has but a daughter, that daughter can only furnish the
nurse and servant in her own person, skilled or unskilled
as the case may be ; and both of them are a charge upon
the other relatives or the community for the necessaries
of life. Why does not the equally capable daughter
do more to support her parent when it is necessary?
She cannot, if she is herself the nurse and servant. Why
does she have to be herself the nurse and servant?
Because she has been always kept at home and denied
the opportunity to take up some trade or profession by
which she could have at once supported herself, her
parents, and done good service in the world. Because
** the home is the place for women,'' and in the home is
neither social service nor self-support.

There is another and a darker side to this position.
The claim of exclusive personal service from the daugh-
ter is maintained by parents who are not poor, not old,
not sick, not feeble; by a father who is quite able to

S65

THE HOME

pay for all the service he requires, and who prefers
to maintain his daughter in idleness for his own
antiquated masculine pride — ^and by a mother who is
quite able to provide for herself, if she choose to ; who is
no longer occupied by the care of little children, who does
not even do house-service, but who lives in idleness her-
self, and then claims the associate idleness of her daugh-
ter, on grounds past finding out. Perhaps it is that an
honourably independent daughter, capable, respected,
well-paid, valuable to the community, would be an in-
supportable reproach to the lady of the house. Per-
haps it is a more pathetic reason — ^the home-bound, half-
developed life, released from the inmiediate cares, which,
however ill-fulfilled, at least gave sanction to her posi-
tion, now seeks to satisfy its growing emptiness by the
young life's larger hope and energy. This may be ex-
planation, but is no justification.

The value and beauty of motherhood depend on the
imperative needs of childhood. The filial service of the
child depends on the imperative needs of the parent.
When the girl is twenty-one and the mother is forty-five,
neither position holds. The amount of love and care
needed by either party does not require all day for its
expression. The young, strong, well-educated girl
should have her place and work, equally with her brother.

266

}

THE GlJtX AT HOME
Does not the mother love her son, tiiouf^h he is in busi-
ness? Could she not manage to love a daughter in busi-
ness, too? It is not love, far less is it wisdom, which ^19
needlessly immolates a young life on the altar of this
ancient custom of home-worship. The loving mother is
not immortal. What is to become of the unmarried
daughter after the mother is gone?

What has the home done to fit her for life. She may
be rich enough to continue to live in it, not to ^^ have to
work,'' but is she, at fifty, still to find contentment in
dusting the parlour and arranging the flowers, in calling
and receiving calls, in entertaining and being enter-
tained? Where is her business, her trade, her art, her
profession, her place in life? The home is not the whole
of life. It is a very minor part of it — ^a mere place of
preparation for living. To keep the girl at home is to
cut her off from life.

More and more is this impossible. The inherited power
of the ages is developing women to such an extent that
by the simple force of expansion they are cracking the
confining walls about them, bursting out in all directions,
rising under the enormous pressure that keeps them
down like mushrooms under a stone. The girl has now
enough of athletic training to strengthen her body, bal-
ance her nerves, set her. tingling with the healthy im-

267

THE HOME

pulse to do. She has enough mental training to give
some background and depth to her mind, with the habit
of thinking somewhat. If she is a college girl, she has
had the inestimable privilege of looking at the home from
outside, in which new light and proportion it has a very
different aspect.

The effort is still made by proud and loving fathers,
unconscious of their limitations, to keep her there after-
ward, and by loving mothers even more effectually. They
play upon the strings of conscience, duty, and affection.
They furnish every pleasant temptation of physical
comfort, ease, the slow corruption of unearned goods.
To oppose this needs a wider range of vision and a
greater strength of character than the daughter of a
thousand hcnnes can usually command.

The school has helped her, but she has not had it long.
The college has helped her more, but that is not a gen-
eral possession as yet, and has had still shorter influence.
Strong, indeed, is the girl who can decide within herself
where duty lies, and follow that decision against the

combined forces which hold her back. She must claim
the right of every individual soul to its own path in life,
its own true line of work and growth. She must claim
the duty of every individual soul to give to its all-pro-
viding society some definite service in return. She must

268

THE GIEL AT HOME

recognise the needs of the world, of her country, her city,
her place and time in human progress, as well as the
needs of her personal relations and her personal home.
And, further, using the parental claim of gratitude and
duty in its own teeth, she must say: ^^ Because I love
you I wish to be worthy of you, to be a hiunan creature
you may be proud of as well as a daughter you are fond
of. Because I owe you care and service when you need it,
I must fit myself now to render that care and service
eflSciently. Moreover, my duty to you is not all my duty
in the world. Life is not merely an aggregation
of families. I must so live as to meet all my duties,
and, in so doing, I shall better love and serve my
parents."

Conscience is strong in women. Children are very
violently taught that they owe all to their parents, and
the parents are not slow in foreclosing the mortgage.
But the home is not a debtor's prison — ^to girls any
more than to boys. This enormous claim of parents
calls for examination.

Do they in truth do all for their children; do their
children owe all to them? Is nothing furnished in the
way of safety, sanitation, education, by that larger
home, the state? What could these parents do, alone, in
never so pleasant a home, without the allied forces of

S69

THE HOME

society to maintain that home in peace and prosperity.
These lingering vestiges of a patriarchal cult must be
left behind. Ancestor-worship has had victims enough.
Girls are human creatures as well as boys, and both have
duties, imperative duties, quite outside the home.

On^ more protest is to be heard : ^^ Most girls marry.
Surely they might stay at home contentedly until they
leave it for another." Yes, most girls marry. All girls
ought to — unless there is something wrong with them.
And, being married, they should have homes. But, to
have a home and enjoy it, is one thing; to stay in it —
the whole time — ^is quite another. It is the same old as-
sumption that woman is a house-animal ; that she has no
place in the open, no business in the world. If the girl
had a few years of practical experience in the world she
would be far better able to enjoy and appreciate her own
home when she had one. At present, being so much re-
stricted where she is, she very often plunges from the
frying-pan into the fire, simply from too much home.

" Whv should she have married that fellow ! " cries
the father ; " I gave her a good home — ^she had every-
thing she wanted." It does not enter the mind of this
man that a woman is something more than a rabbit. Even
rabbits, well-fed rabbits, will gnaw and dig to get out —
they like to run as well as eat. Also, the girl whose char-

270

THE GIRL AT HOME
acter has time to ^^ set " a little in some legitimate busi-
ness associations, instead of being held in everlasting
solution at home, will be able to face the problems of
domestic industry and expense with new eyes.

No men, with practical sense and trained minds,
would put up for a week with the inchoate mass of
wasted efforts in the home; and, when women have the
same trained minds and practical sense, they will not put
up with it much longer. For the home's sake, as well as
her own sake, the girl wiU profit by experience in the
working world.

Once she learns the pleasure and power of specialisa-
tion, the benefits of organisation, the advantages of com-
bination, the whole tremendous enginery of civilised life,
she can no more drop back into her ancestral cradle than
her brother could turn into an Arcadian shepherd, piping
prettily to his fleecy charge.

271

XIV
HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN

IN our peculiar and artificial opposition of ^^the
Home '* and " the World,'* we have roughly
ascribed all the virtues to the first, and all the vices
to the second. " The world, the flesh, and the devil "
we still associate, forgetting that home is the very
temple of the flesh, and in no way impervious to the
devil. Sin is found at home as generally as elsewhere —
must be, unless women are sinless and men absolved on
entering the sacred door.

There are different sins and virtues, truly, as we have
seen in the chapter on Domestic Ethics. There is less
fighting at home, as there is but one man there. There
is less stealing, the goods being more in common, only
sometimes a sly rifling of pockets -by the unpaid wife.
A man pays his housekeeper, or his housemaids, because
he has to ; and he pays, and pays highly, the purely ex-
tortionate women of pleasure; but sometimes he forgets
to pay his wife, and sometimes she steals. The home
has patience, chastity, industry, love. But there is
less justice, less honour, less courage, less truth; it

^12

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
does not embrace all the virtues. Such as it is, strong
for good and also very weak for some good, possibly
even showing some tendencies to evil, what is its influence
on men?

The boy baby feels it first ; and that we have touched
on. The home teaches the boy that women were made
for service, domestic service, that the principal cares and
labours of life are those which concern the body, and that
his own particular tastes and preferences are of enormous
importance. As fast as he gets out of the home and into
the school, he learns quite other things, getting his ex-
aggerated infant egotism knocked out of him very sud-
denly, and, as he gets out of school and into business,
also into politics, he learns still further of the condi-
tions of life. Proportion changes, perspective changes ;
he grows to have a very different view of life from the
woman's view. The same thing happening to a man and
a woman produces a widely varying effect; what is a
trifle in the day's large activities to him is an event of
insistent pressure to her; and, here, in the eternal mis-
understanding between the home-bred woman and the
world-bred man, lie the seeds of ceaseless trouble. The
different range of vision of the occupant of the home and
the occupant of the world makes it impossible for them
to see things similarly. We are familiar with the dif-

27S

THE HOME

ference, but have always considered it a distinction of
sex.

We have called the broader, sounder, better balanced,
more fully exercised brain ** a man's brain," and the
narrower, more emotional and personal one ** a woman's
brain " ; whereas the difference is merely that between
the world and the house. The absolute relation betwe;^
any animal's brain and his range of activity is patent
to the zoologist, and simply furnishes the proof of its
law of development. The greater the extent and com-
plexity of any creature's business, the greater the mental
capacity, of course.

We are familiar with the mental effect of living on
small islands — ^** the insular mind," " insular prejudice "
are well known terms. The smaller the island, the more
deprived of contact and association with the rest of the
world, the greater the insularity of mind. The English-
man is somewhat affected by the size of his country;
the Manxman still more, and the dwellers on the light-
house rock most of all. Our homes are not physically
isolated, save on scattered farms and ranches — where the
worst results are found; but they are isolated in their
interests and industries.

The thought used every day is thought about half a
dozen people and their concerns, mainly their personal

274

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
bodily care and comfort; the mental processes of the
woman must needs be intensified in personality as they
are limited in range. Hence her greater sensitiveness to
all personal events, and that quick variation in attitude
so inevitable in a mind whose daily work involves con-
tinual and instant change. Varium et mutabUel
murmurs the man sagely — ^^ A woman's privilege is to
change her mind ! " If the nature of his industry were
such that he had to change his mind from cooking to
cleaning, from cleaning to sewing, from sewing to nurs-
ing, from nursing to teaching, and so, backward, for-
ward, crosswise and over again, from morning to night —
he too would become adept in the lightning-change act.

The man adopts one business and follows it. He
develops special ability, on long lines, in connection with
wide interests — ^and so grows broader and steadier. The
distinction is there, but it is not a distinction of sex.
This is why the man forgets to mail the letter. He is
used to one consecutive train of thought and action.
She, used to a varying zigzag horde of little things, can
readily accommodate a few more.

The home-bred brain of the woman continually
puzzles and baffles the world-bred brain of the man ; and
from the beginning of their association it has an effect
upon him. In childhood even he sees his sister serving;

* 276

THE HOME
in the home functions far more than he is required to do;
she is taught to ** clean up '' where he is not ; different
values are assigned to the same act in boy or girl, and
he is steadily influenced by it. The first effect of the
home on the boy is seen very young in his contempt for
girls, and girls' play or work. When, after a period of
separation wherein he has consorted as far as possible
only with boys and men, he is again drawn towards the
girl on lines of sex-attraction, a barrier has risen between
them which is never whoUy removed.

He has immense areas of experience utterly unknown
to her. His words and acts in a given case are modified
by a thousand memories and knowledges which she has
not ; so word and act differ sharply, though the immedi-
ate exciting cause be the same. The very terms they use
have different weight and meaning; the man must pick
and choose and adopt a different speech in talking to a
woman. He loves, he admires, he venerates; and from
this attitude considering all her foolishness and ignorance
as feminine and therefore charming, he is thus taught
to worship ignoble things.

Charles Reade in his " Peg Woffington *' describes that
strong, brave, intelligent, and most charming woman as
starting and screaming at a very distant rat — ^and her
lover being therefore more strongly attracted to her.

276

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
Every sign of weakness, timidity, inability to understand
and do, is deemed feminine and admired. Yet we all
know that the best love is that which exalts, that which
truly respects as well as fondly enjoys.

The smallness of the home-bound woman is not so
injurious as the still smaller nature of the harem-bound,
by as much as the home is larger and freer than the
harem; but just as harem women limit man's growth, so
do home women in slighter degree. The influence of
women upon men is enormous. The home-bound mother
limits the child and boy ; the home-bound girl limits the
youth; and the home-bound wife keeps up the pressure
for life. It is not that women are really smaller-minded,
weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating; but that
whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small dark
place, is always guarded, protected, directed, and re-
strained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened
by it.

The woman is narrowed by the home and the man is
narrowed by the woman. In proportion as man is great,
as his interests are world-wide and his abilities high, is he
injured by constant contact with a smaller mind» The
more ordinary man feels it less, being himself nearer to
the domestic plane of thought and action ; but the belit-
tling efi^ect is there all the time.

277

THE HOME

If the boy's mother amimanded as wide a range of
action as his father; if her work were something to
honour and emulate as well as her dear self something to
love, the boy would never learn to use that bitter term
" only mother." The father is a soldier, and the boy
admires and longs to follow in great deeds. The father
is a captain of industry — ^a skilled tradesman, a good
physician — ^the boy has the father to love, and the work
to admire as well. The father is something to other
people, as well as all in all to him ; and the boy has a
new respect for him, seeing him in the social relation as
well as the domestic. But his mother he sees only in the
domestic relation and is early taught by the father him-
self, that he is "to take care of her!" Think of it!
Teaching a child that he is to take care of his mother!
A full-grown able-bodied woman will take a child of tet
out with her at night — ^^ to protect her ! "

The exquisite absurdity of this position has no com-
parison or parallel. Think of a cow protected by a
calf! A bear by a cub — a, cat by a kitten! A tall,
swift mare by a lanky colt! An alert, sharp-toothed
collie by a timibling, fat-pawed pup! How can a boy
respect a thing that he, a child, can take care of! He
can love, and does. He can take care of, and does
He can later on support, and does ; and even — ^this in a

878

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
recent instance of this sublime monstrosity — ^he can
** give away " hii own mother in marriage ! No wonder
he so soon learns to say ^' only mother ! " When she is
not only mother, but mother and much besides, a real
human being, usefully exercising her human faculties,
the boy will make a better man.

Again, if his sister shared every freedom and advan-
tage of childhood; were equally educated, not only in
school, but in play, and in the ever-stimulating experi-
ences of daily life, he would feel far differently toward
her.

See two children on a journey, the mother holding
fast to the girl from beginning to end, only the car seat
and window for her ; the boy on the steps, the platform,
running about the station, asking questions of brakeman
and engineer, learning all the time. The boy gets five
times as much out of life as the girl, and he knows it.
It is not long before he is ashamed to play with girls,
and one cannot blame him.

Then comes the sweetheart. A new deep love, a great
overmastering reverence for the Woman, rises in his
heart. In the light of that love he accepts her as she is,
glorifying and idealising every weakness, every limita-
tion, because it is hers. This is not well. He could
Aove her just as well, better, if his reverence were better

279

THE HOME

deseryed, if the dignity of sex were enhanced by the
dignity of a wise, strong, capable human being.

Of course the man feels that he would not love her as
well if she were different. So he felt in past ages when
she was even more feminine, even less human. So he will
feel in coming ages, when she is truly his equal, a strong
and understanding friend, a restful and stimulating
companion, as well as the beautiful and loving woman.
We have always been drawn together by love and always
will be. The beautiful Georgian slave is beloved, the
peasant lass, the princess ; man loves woman, and she need
not fear any change in that.

Our error lies in a false estimate of womanhood and
manhood. The home, its labours, cares, and limitations
we have called womanly; and everything else in life
manly; wherefore if a woman manifested any power,
ambition, interest, outside the home, that was un-
womanly and must cost her her position as such. This is
entirely wrong.

A woman is a woman and attractive to the men of her
place and time, whether she be a beaded Hottentot, a
rosy milkmaid, a pretty schoolma'am, or a veiled beauty
of the Zenana.

We are taught that man most loves and admires the
domestic type of woman. This is one of the roaring

280

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
jokes of history. The breakers of hearts, the queens of
romance, the goddesses of a thousand devotees, have not
been cooks.

Women in general are attractive to men, but let a
woman be glaringly conspicuous — ^the great singer,
dancer, actress — immediately she has lovers without
number. The best-loved women of all time have not
been the little brown birds at home, by any means. Of
course, when a man marries the queen of song he expects
her to settle at once to the nest and remain there. But
does he thereafter maintain the same degree of devotion
that he bestowed before? It is not easy, after all, to main-
tain the height of romantic devotion for one's house-
servant — or even one's housekeeper. The man loves his
wife; but it is in spite of the home — ^not because of it.
And wherever the shadow of unhappiness falls between
them, wherever the sad record of sorrow and sin is begun,
it is too often because love strays from that domestic area
to follow a freer bird in a wider field.

It is not marriage which brings this danger, it is
domestic service ; it is not the perfect and mutual owner-
ship of love, nor the sanction of law and religion ; it is
the one-sided ownership wherein the wife becomes the
private servant, cook, cleaner, mender of rents, a valet,
janitor, and chambermaid. Even as such she has more

S81

THE HOME

practical claim to respect than the wife who does not do
this work nor any other; who is not the servant of the
house, but merely its lady ; who has absolutely no claim
to human honour, no place in the social scheme, except
that of the female.

Thus we find that the influence of the home upon man,
as felt through the home-restricted woman, is not always
for the best ; and that even, as supposedly increasing the
woman's charm, it does not work.

What follows further of the influence of the home
upon man directly? How does it modify his personal
life and development? The boy grows and breaks out
of the home. It has for him a myriad ties — ^but he does
not like to be tied. He strikes out for himself. If
he is an English boy of the upper classes he is cut off
early and sent to a boarding school ; later he has '* cham-
bers *' of his own. If an American, he simply goes into
business, and in most cases away from home, boarding
for a while. Then he loves, marries, and sets up a home
of his own; a woman-and-child house, which he gladly
and proudly maintains and in many ways enjoys.

So satisfied are we in our convictions regarding this
status that we really and practically worship the home
and family, holding it to be a man's first duty to main-
tain them. No man does it more patiently and gener-

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HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
ously than the American, and he is supported in his
position by all the moral opinion of our world. He is
'^ a good family man " we say, and can say no more.
To stay at home evenings is especially desirable; the
more of life that can be spent at home the better, we
think, for all concmed. Now what is the real effect
upon the man? Is the home, as we have it, satisfying to
the real needs of man's nature; and if not, could it
be improved?

The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home
is found in his uniyersal absence from it. It is not only
that his work takes him out (and he sees to it that it
does !) but the man who does not '* have to work " also
goes out, for pleasure.

The leisure classes in any country have no necessity
upon them to leave home, yet their whole range of uneasy
activity is to get outside, or to furnish constant diver-
sion and entertainment, to while away the hours within.
A human creature must work, play, or rest. Men work
outside, play outside, and cannot rest more than so long
at a time.

The man maintains a home, as part of his life-area,
but does not himself find room in it. This is legitimate
enough. It should be equally true of the woman. No
human life of our period can find full exercise in a home.

S8S

THE HOME
Both need it, to rest in; to work from; but not to
stay in.

This we find practically worked out in the average
man's attitude toward the home. He provides it, cheer-
fully, affectionately, proudly ; at any cost of labour, care,
and ingenuity ; but if he has to stay in it too much, he
knows it softens and enfeebles him.

So he goes out, to meet men, to work and live as far as
he can ; and when he wants " a real good time," — ^rest,
recreation, healthful amusement, — ^he goes altogether
with ^* the boys." The distant camp in the woods, the
mountain climb, the hunting trip, — ^real rest and pleas-
iu*e to the man are found with men away from home.

There is a sort of strain in the constant association
with the smaller life, as there is in the painful keeping
step with shorter legs; a slow, soft, gentle downward
pull, against which every active man rebels. But he is
bound to it, for life. The immutable laws of sex hold him
to the wcnnan ; and as she is so he must be, more or less.

He is bound to the home by the needs of the child, and
by the physical convenience and necessity of the place.
If it were all that it should be, it would offer to the man
rest, comfort, stimulus, and inspiration. In so far as
it does, it is right. In so far as it does not, it is wrong.
The ideal home shines clear and bright, at the end of the

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HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
day's work. Peace and happiness, relief from all effort
and anxiety, the calm replenishment of food and sleep,
the most delightful companionship. In some cases it
gives all this in fact. In many, many others the man
has to descend in coming home — ^to come down to it
instead of up. In it is a whole new field of cares,
worries, and labours. The primitive machinery of the
place, so imperfectly managed by the inexpert average
woman, jars rudely on his specialised consciousness.
The children are his pride and joy — ^that is as it should
be. But when their lack of intelligent care robs him of
his rest at night ; and their lack of intelligent education,
makes them an anxiety and a distress instead of a com*
fort ; that is as it should not be.

He does not bring his deficiencies in business home to
his wife and expect her to walk the floor at night with
them. The systematised man's work is done for the
day, and he comes home to shoulder a share of the
unsystematised inadequate woman's work. When the
woman of exceptional ability keeps the whole house
running smoothly, has no trouble with servants, no
trouble with the children, then the influence of the home
on man is pure beneficence. Such cases are most rare.
So used are we to the contrary, so besotted in our blind
adoration of ancient deficiencies, that we exhort the

286

THE HOME

young couple to face ^* the cares and troubles of married
life " as if they really were an essential part of it. They
have nothing to do with married life. They are the
cares and troubles of our antiquated^ mischievous system
of housekeeping.

If men in their business were still using methods of
a million years ago, they would need some exhortation
too. It is marvellous that the same man who casts upon
the scrap heap his most expensive machinery to replace
it with still better, who constantly adjusts and readjusts
his business to the latest demands of our rapidly chang-
ing time, can go home and contentedly endure the same
petty difficulties which his father and his grandfather
and all his receding ancestors endured in turn.

The inadequacy of the home, the gross imperfections
of its methods and management have anything but a
helpful influence on men. Necessary difficulties are to be
borne or overcome, but to suffer with a sickle when a
steam reaper is to be had is contemptible rather than
elevating. There will be some pathetic protest here that
it Is a man's duty to help woman bear the troubles and
difficulties of the home. The woman ardently believes
this, and the man too, sometimes. Of all incredible
impositions this is the most astounding.

Here we see half the human race, equally able with the

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HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
oiher half (equal does not mean similar, remember!),
content to see every industry on earth taken away from
them, save house-service and child-culture, growing up
in the full knowledge and acceptance of this field of
labour, generally declining to study said industries be-
fore undertaking them, cheerfully undertaking them
without any pretense of efficiency, and then calling upon
the other half of the world, upon men, who do everything
else that is done to maintain our civilisation, to help them
do their work !

We object to seeing the man harness the woman to the
plough, and we are right. It is a poor way to work. A
horse is more efficient, a steam-plough still better. It is
time that we objected to the woman's effort to harness
the man to the home, in all its cumbrous old-world in--
efficiencies. It is not more labour that the home wants, it
is better machinery and administration.

Some hold that the feebleness of woman has a benef-
icent effect on man, draws out many of his nobler quali-
ties. He should then marry a bed-ridden invalid — ^a
purblind idiot — and draw them all out !

The essential weakness and deficiencies of the child are
quite sufficient to call out all the strength and wisdom of
both parents, without adding this travesty of child-
hood, this pretended helplessness of a full-grown woman,

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THE HOME
The shame of it ! That a mother, one who needs everj
attainable height of wisdom and power, should forego
her own human development — ^to make good her claim
on man for food and clothes and draw out his nobler
qualities! The virtue of parentage is to be measured
by its success, not by the amount of effort and sacrifice
expended.

Granting that the care of the body is woman's especial
work ; the feeding, clothing, and cleaning of the world ;
she should by this time have developed some system of
doing it which would make it less of a burden to the man
as well as the woman. It is most discreditable to the
business sense of a modem community that these vitally
important life processes should be so clumsily performed,
at such heavy cost of time, labour, and money.

The care and education of children are legitimately
shared by the father. In this a man and his wife are
truly partners. They engage in a common business
and both labour in it. At present the man by no means
does his share in this all-important work, save as he does
it collectively, through school and college; there the
woman is in default.

In the early years the man gives little thought and
care to the child, this being supposed to be perfectly well
attended to by the woman. That it is not, we may

S88

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
readily see; but the man can by no means assist in it;
because he is so overburdened already in the material
provision for the home.

The enormous and unnecessary expense of our do-
mestic processes constitutes so excessive a drain on man's
energy that it would be cruel, as well as useless, to expect
him to do more.

With the reduction in expense which we have shown
to be possible, lessening the cost of living by two-thirds
and adding to productive labour by nearly half, the
home, instead of being an unconscionable burden and
ceaseless care, would become what it should be : an easily
attained place of complete rest, comfort, peace, and in-
vigoration.

The present influence of the home on men is felt most
through this inordinate expense. The support of the
family we have laid entirely upon man, thus developing
in the dependent woman a limitless capacity for receiving
things, and denying her the power to produce them. If
this result remained in its simple first degree it would be
bad enough; requiring of the man the maintenance of
himself, a healthy able-bodied woman, and all the chil-
dren, instead of having a vigorous helpmate, to honour-
ably support herself, and do her share toward supporting
her own children.

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THE HOME

This result Is cumulatiye, however. The confinement
of the woman to the home, when she does not labour,
results in her becoming a parasite, and the appetite of a
parasite is insatiable. She has no sense of what we call
** the value of money,*' — meaning how much labour it
represents, — ^because she never laboured for it. She re-
ceived it from her father, all unthinking of where he
got it, as is natural to a child ; and she continues to be a
child, receiving as unthinkingly from her husband. This
position we consider right, even beautiful; man stoutly
maintains it himself, and considers any effort of the
woman to support herself as a reflection on him. He
has arrogated to himself as a masculine function the
power of producing wealth ; and considers it ** un-
f eminine " for a woman to do it ; and as indicating a lack
of manliness in him.

He should " consider the ant," in this capacity, or the
bee; and see that a purely masculine functionary has
no other occupation whatsoever. He should consider
also the male savage — ^he is ** masculine " enough surely ;
but he is little else. Last, nearest, and most practical he
should consider the immense majority of women all over
the world to-day who labour in the home. The Lady
of the House is a pure parasite, almost wholly detri-
mental in her Influence, but the Housewife is one of the

0Q(\

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
hardest workers on earth. She works unceasingly; as
Mrs. Diaz put it years ago, in a thoughtful husband's
sudden consideration of his wife's working hours — ^^ No
noonings — ^no evenings — ^no rainy days ! " She works
harder and longer than the man, in a miscellaneous shift-
ing field of effort far more exhausting to vitality than
his specialised line ; and she bears children toot If any
man could make a bo€ust equal to that of the mother of
nine children — (whose son told me this himself) that she
had never missed washing on Monday but twice — ^there
might be some ground for the claim of superior strength.

In this kind of home — ^and it is still the rule on earth
*— what is the influence on man? Does this grade and
amount of labour on the part of women lighten the bur-
den, as we so fondly and proudly assume? It shows
great ignorance of economic values to assume it.

The poorer a man is, the mor6 he has to pay for every-
thing. In this nine-tenths of our population where the
woman works in the home, the man works harder and gets
less comfort for his money than among those more suc-
cessful men able to maintain a parasite. He sustains to
the fullest degree all the economic disadvantages we
have previously enumerated — ^the last extreme of waste-
ful purchase, the lowest stage of industrial exchange.
With him, a self-supporting wife would at once double

291

THE HOME

the family Income, and tiie benefits of organised labour
and purchase would reduce their expenses at the same
time. The unnecessary expenses of a poor man's home
are far greater in proportion than those of the rich man ;
and his enjoyment of the place is less.

He has always a tired wife, an unprogressiye wife, a
wife who cannot be to him what a strong, happy, growing
woman should be. If she had eight hours (to take even
the custom of our labour-wasting time) of specialised
work, to be done with and left with eagerness for the
beloved home, she would have a far fresher and more
stimulating mind than she has after her ceaseless, con-
fusing toils in the confined domestic atmosphere. The
two, together, could afford a better house. The two,
together, with twice the money and half the expense for
food, could furnish their children with far better care
than the overworked and undereducated housewife can
give them.

The result upon the man would be pleasant, indeed.
A clean, pretty, quiet home — ^not full of smell and steam
and various messy industries, but simply a place to rest
in when he comes to it. A wife as glad to be at home as
he. Children also glad of the reunion hour, and the
mother and father both delighted to be with their chil-
dren. What is there in this a man should dread?

^92

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN

Would not such a home be good to come to, and would
not its influence be wholly pleasant? Our Puritanism
shrinks at the idea of homes being wholly pleasant.
They should be something of a trial, we think, for our
soul's good. The wife and mother ought to be tired and
overworked, careworn, dirty, anxious from hour to hour
as she tries to ^^ mind the children " and all her other
trades as well. The man ought to be contented with the
exhausted wife, the screaming babies, the ill-cooked food,
the general weary chaos of the place, the endless demand
on his single purse.

Is he? What is the average workingman's attitude
toward this supposed haven of rest? The statistics of
the temperance society are enough to show us the facts*
A man does not like that kind of a place — ^and why
should he?

He is tired, working for six or ten; and to go from
his completed labour of the day, back to his wife's un-
completed labour of the day and night, does not rest him.
He wants companionship. She cannot give it him. Her
talk is of the suds, the coal, the need of shoes, clothes,
furniture, utensils — everything!

He wants amusement, she cannot give it him. An
exhausted woman, taken every day, is not entertaining.
The children are, or should be, in bed. The wife wants

S9S

THE HOME
rest and companionship, and amusement, too ; but that is
another story. We are considering the man. She must
stay at home in any case, the home being her place ; but
he does not have to, and out he goes.

The instinctive demands of a highly developed human
creature, a social creature, are strong within him ; needs
as vital as the needs of the body, and utterly unsatis-
fied at home. Out he goes, and to the one pleasant open
door — ^the saloon. Ease, freedom, comfort, pleasant
company, talk of something new, amusement — ^these are
the main needs ; and if a stimulating drink is the neces-
sary price, there is nothing in the average man's ill-fed
stomach, overdeveloped personal selfishness, or untrained
conscience, to refuse it.

The measureless results in evil we all know well. Many
are the noble souls devoting their life's efforts to the
closmg of the saloon, the driving back of erring man to
the safe and supposedly all-satisfying shelter of the
home. We do not dream that it is the home which
drives him there.

One thing we have divined at last; that insufficient
and ill-chosen food, villainously cooked, is one great
cause of man's need for stimulants. Under this much
illumination we now strive mightily to make man's
private cook a better cook. If every man's wife were a

S94

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
Delmonico, if his appetites were catered to with absolute
skill and ingenuity, would that teach him temperance
and self-control?

The worse the private cook, the greater the physical
need for stimulant. The better the private cook, the
greater the self-indulgence developed in the happy Epi-
curean. But good or bad, no man of any grade can get
the social stimulus he needs by spending every evening
with his cook !

That is the key to the whole thing. Your cook may be
^a treasure," she may cater to your needs most ex-
quisitely, she may also be the mother of your children, as
has been the case from the earliest times ; but she is none
the less your own personal servant, and as such not
your social equal. You may love her dearly and honour
her in her female capacity, also honour the excellence of
her cooking, but you are not satisfied with her conver-
sation or her skill in games.

The influence of the home with a working wife is not
all that could be desired; and we may turn with some
hope of better things to the home with a parasite wife.
Here certainly the man comes home to rest and peace and
comfort, and to satisfying companionship with the
^ eternal feminine." Here is a woman who is nothing
on earth but a woman, not even a cook. Here, of course,

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THE HOME
the food is satisfactory ; the children all a father's heart
could wish, having the advantage of the incessant de-
votion of an entire mother ; the machinery of the home, so
painfully prominent to the workingman, is here running
smoothly and unseen ; and the whole thing is well within
the means of the proud " provider.'*

What the food supply is in the hands of the housemaid
we have seen. What the child is in the hands of the
nursemaid, we may see anywhere. The parasitic woman
by no means uses the time free of housework to devote
herself to her children. A mother is essentially a worker.
When a woman does not work it dries the very springs of
motherhood. The idler she is, the less she does for her
children. The rich man's children are as often an
anxiety and disappointment to him as the poor man's.

The expense of the place is a thing of progressive
dimensions. The home of the parasitic woman is a bot-
tomless pit for money. She is never content. How could
a human creature be content in such an unnatural posi-
tion? She is supplied with nourishment; she has such
social stimulus as her superficial contact with her kind
affords, but nothing comes out; there is no commen-
surate action.

In the uneasy distress of this position her only idea
of relief is to get something more ; if she is not satisfied

296

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
after one dinner, get or give another dinner ; if not satis«
fied with one dress, get two, get twenty, get them all!
If the home does not satisfy, by all means get another
one in the country; perhaps that will feel different;
try first one and then the other. If the two, or three,
should pall, get a yacht, go to some other country, get
more things to put in the home or on one's pretty body ;
get, get, get ! and never a thought of the ease and free-
dom and joy that would come of Doing. Not of playing
at doing, with a hot poker or a modelling tool — ^but
really doing human work. It does not occur to her, and
it does not occur to him. He thinks it right and beauti-
ful to maintain the dainty domestic vampire, and pours
forth his life's service to meet her insatiate demands;
All the reward he asks is her love and faith, her sweet
companionship.

May we look, then, in homes of this class for an ideal
influence on man? Consecrating his life to the business
of not only feeding and clothing, but profusely decorat-
ing and amusing a useless woman, — does this have an
elevating effect on him? When he thinks of how charm-
ing she will look in the costly fur, the lace, the jewels,
how she will enjoy the new home, the new carriage, the
new furniture ; of her fresh and ceaseless delight in her
** social functions " — does his heart leap within him?

297

THE HOME

He performs wonders in business, honest or dishonest,
useful to mankind or cruel; he slowly relinquishes the
ideals of his youth, devotes his talents to whatever will
make the most money, even prostitutes his political con-
science, and robs the city and the state, in order to meet
the demands of that fair, plump, smiling Queen of the
Home.

And she gives in return — ? Her influence is — ? The
working wife does not lift a man up very high. The
parasite wife pulls him down. The home of the working
wife gives to boy and man the impression that women
are servants. The home of the idle wife gives to boy
and man the impression that women are useless and ra-
pacious ; but, we must have them because they are women.

This is the worst that the home shows us, and is, fortu-
nately, confined to a minority of cases. But it is none
the less an evil influence of large extent. It leaves to the
woman no functions whatever save those of the female,
and, as exaggeration is never health, does not improve
her as a female.

The really restful and stimulating companionship of
man and wife, the general elevating social intercourse
between men and women, is not to be found in the homes
of the wealthy any more than in those of the poor. The
demands upon the man are unending, and the returns in

298

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN
good to body or mind bear no proportion to the expense.
The woman who has no other field of usefulness or
growth than a home wherein she is not even the capable
servant, cannot be the strong, noble, upliftiilg creature
who does good to man; but rapidly becomes the type
most steadily degrading.

299

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

IF there is one fact more patent than another in re-
gard to social evolution, it is that our gain is far
greater in material progress than in personal. The
vast and rapid increase in wealth, in power, in knowl-
edge, in facility and speed in production and distribu-
tion; the great spread of political, religious, and edu-
cational advantages ; all this is in no way equalled by any
gain in personal health and personal happiness.

The world grows apace ; the people do not keep pace
with it. Our most important machines miss much of
their usefulness because the brain of the workman has
not improved as rapidly as the machine. Great systems
of transportation, involving intricate mechanical ar-
rangement, break continually at this, their weakest link
— the human being. We create and maintain elaborate
systems of justice and equity, of legislation, administra-
tion, education; and they are always open to failure in
this same spot — ^the men are not equal to the system.
The advance in public good is far greater than the ad-
vance in private good. We have improved every facility

SOO

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

in Kving ; but we still live largely as before — sick, feeble,
foolishly quarrelling over small personal matters, un-*
aware of our own great place in social evolution. This
has always been known to us and has been used ojily
to prove our ancient theory as to the corrupt and paltry
stuff humanity is made of. ^^ Frail creatures of dust,
and feeble as frail," is our grovelling conf es»on ; and to
those who try to take comfort in our undeniable historic
gains, it has been triumphantly pointed out that, gain as
we would, " the human heart ** was no better — ^^ poor
human nature " was unimprovable. This is utterly un-
true.

Human nature has changed and improved in tremen-
dous ratio; and, if its improvement has been strangely
irregular, far greater in social life than in personal life,
it is for a very simple reason. All these large social
processes which show such marked improvement are those
wherein people work together in legitimate specialised
lines in the world. These personal processes which have
not so improved, the parts of life which are still so limited
and imperfectly developed, may be fully accounted for
by their environment — the ancient and unchanging home.
Bring the home abreast of our other institutions; and
our personal health and happiness will equal our public
gains.

801

THE HOME

Once more it must be stated that the true home, the
legitimate and necessary home, the home in right pro-
portion and development, is wholly good. It is at once
the beautiful beginning, the constant help, and one legiti-
mate end of a life's work. To the personal life, the
physical life, this is enough. To the social life, it is not.
If human duty had no other scope than to maintain and
reproduce this species of animal, that duty might be ac-
complished in the home. The purely maternal female,
having no other reason for being than to bear and rear
young ; a marauding male, to whom the world was but a
hunting ground wherein to find food for his family—
these, and their unimproved successors, need nothing
more than homes. But human duty is not so limited.
These processes of reproduction are indeed essential to
our human life, as are the processes of respiration and
digestion, but they do not constitute that life, much less
conclude it.

As human beings, our main field of duty lies in pro-
moting social advance. To maintain ourselves and our
families is an animal duty we share with the other ani-
mals; to maintain each other, and, by so doing to in-
crease our social efiiciency, is human duty, first, last, and
always. We have always seen the necessity for social
groups, religious, political, and other; we have more or

302

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

less fulfilled our social functions therein ; but we have in
the main supposed that all this common effort was merely
for the greater safety and happiness of homes ; and when
the interests of the home and those of the state clashed,
most of us have put home first.

The first person to learn better was that very earliest
of social servants, the soldier. He learned first of all to
combine for the common good, and though his plane of
service was the lowest of all, mere destruction, the group
sentiments involved were of the highest order. The
destructive belligerence of the male, and his antecedent
centuries of brute combat, made fighting qualities most
prominent ; but the union and organisation required for
successful human warfare called out high social qual-
ities, too. The habit of acting together necessarily
develops in the brain the power and desire to act to-
gether; the fact that success or failure, life or death,
advantage or injury, depends on collective action, neces-
sarily develops the social consciousness. This modifi-
cation we find in the army everywhere, gradually in-
creasing with race-heredity; and, long since, so far
overwhelming the original egoism of the individual
animal, that the common soldier habitually sacrifices his
life to the public service without hesitation.

The steps in social evolution must always be made in

303

THE HOME

this same natural order, from one stage of development
to another, by means of existing qualities. Primitive
man had no altruism, he had no honour, his courage was
flickering and wholly personal ; he had no sense of order
and discipline, of self-control and self-sacrifice; but he
had a strong inclination to fight, and by means of that
one tendency he was led into relations which developed all
those other qualities.

It is easy to see that this stage of our social develop-
ment was diametrically opposed by the home. The in-
terests of the home demanded personal service ; the habits
of the home bred industry and patience ; the influence of
the inmates of the home, of the women and children, did
not promote martial qualities. So our valorous ancestor
promptly left home and went a-fighting, for thousands
and thousands of years, while human life was maintained
by the women at home.

When men gradually learned to apply their energies
to production, instead of destruction; learning in slow,
painful, costly ages that wealth was in no way increased
by robbing, nor productive strength by slaughter ; they
were able to apply to their new occupations some of the
advantageous qualities gained in the old. Thus indus-
try grew, spread, organised, and the power and riches
and wisdom of the world began to develop.

304

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

As far back as history can go we find some men pro-
ducing, even while a large and important caste was
still fighting. The warriors sought wealth by plunder-
ing other nations, not realising that if the other nations
had been all warriors there would have been nothing to
plunder. Slowly the wealth-makers overtook the wealth-
takers, caught up with them, passed them; and now the
greater part of the mascuHne energy of the world is
devoted to productive industry in some form, and the
army is recruited from the lowest ranks of life.

In this new field of social service, productive industry,
what is the influence of the home? At first it was alto-
gether good. To wean the man from his all too-natural
instinct to wander, kill, and rob, the attractions of home
life were needed. To centre and localise his pride and
power, to make him bend his irregular expansive tend-
encies to the daily performance of labour, was a diffi-
cult task ; and here again he had to be led by the force
of existing qualities. The woman was the great draw-
ing power here, the ease and comfort of the place, the
growing love of family, and these influences slowly over-
came the warrior and bound him to the plough.

Thus far the home influence led him up, and, in turn,
his military qualities lifted the home industries from the
feminine plane to the human. To produce wealth

805

THE HOME

for the home to consume was a better position than that
of living by plunder ; but we should have small cause to
glory in the march of civilisation if that was all we had
done.

Just as the fierce and brutal savage, entering into
militarv combination, under no better instincts than self-
defence and natural belligerence, yet learned by virtue of
that combination new and noble qualties; so the still
fierce and brutal soldier, entering into industrial com-
bination under no better instincts than those of sex-
attraction and physical wants in increasing degree, yet
learned, by virtue of this form of union, new quali-
ties even more valuable to the race.

The life of any society is based on the successful inter-
action of its members, rather than the number of its
families. For instance, in those vast, fat, ancient em-
pires, where a vast population, scattered over wide terri-
torv, supported local life in detached families, by in-
dividual effort; there was almost no national life, no
'cncral sense of unity, no conscious connection of in-
* orests. The one tie was taxation ; and if some p£issing
conqueror annexed a province, the only change was in
the tax-collector, and the people were not injured un-
less he demanded more than the previous one.

A vital nation must exist in the vivid common con-

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HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

sciousness of its people; a consciousness naturally
developed by enlarging social functions, by undeniable
common interests and mutual services. If any passing
conqueror were to annex — or seek to annex — a, portion of
our vast territory, he would find no slice of jellyfish, no
mere cellular existence with almost no organised life.
He would find that every last and least part of the coun-
try was vitally one with the whole, and would submit to
no dismemberment. This social consciousness, on which
our civilised life depends, in the growth of which lies
social progress, is not developed in the home. On the
contrary it is opposed by it. Up to a certain level the
home promotes social development. Beyond that level
it hinders it, if allowed to do so.

Self-interest drove men into military combination —
where they learned much. Family interest drove them
into industrial activity, and even allowed a low form of
combination. But social interest is what leads us all
farthest and highest; the impulse to live, not for self-
preservation only, not for reproduction only, but for
social progress. It should not be hard to see that these
apparently dissimilar and opposed interests can only be
harmonised by the dominance of the greatest. The man
who would strive for his own advantage at the expense
of his family, we call a brute. The man who strives

807

THE HOME
for the advantage of his family at the expense of his
country — ^we should call a traitor! Yet this is the ccrai-
mon attitude of the citizen of to-day, and in this atti-
tude he is maintained and extolled by the home! The
soldier who would seek to save his own life to the in-
jury of the army we promptly shoot. If he should seek
to save his home at the same risk, we should still dis-
honour and punish him.

The army, very highly developed m a very low
scheme of action, knows that neither self nor family
must stand for a moment against the public service. In-
dustry is not so well organised as warfare, and so our
scale of industrial virtues is not so high. We degrade
and punish for '^ conduct unbecoming an officer and a
gentleman " ; but we take no cognisance of ^^ conduct
unbecoming a manufacturer and a gentleman," unless he
is an open malefactor. Yet a manufacturer is a far
higher and more valuable social servant than a soldier of
any grade. We do not yet know the true order of
importance in our social functions, nor their distinctly
organic nature.

With our proven capacity, why do we manifest so little
progress in industrial organisation and devotion? A stu-
dent of prehuman evolution, one familiar only with na-
ture's long, slow, stumbling process of developing by ex-

308

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

elusion — ^like driving a flock of sheep by killing those who
went the wrong way — ^might answer the question in this
manner: That we have not been engaged in industrial
processes long enough to develop the desired qualities.
This is usually considered the evolutionary standpoint;
and from it we are advised not to be impatient, and are
told that a few thousand years' more killing will do much
for us.

Bui social evolution takes place on quite other grounds.
We have added education to heredity; mutual help to
the cruel and wasteful processes of elimination. The
very essence of social relation is its transmission of in-
dividual advance to the collective. Physical evolution
acts only through physical heredity; we have that
in common with all animals; but we have also social
heredity, that great psychic current of trans-
mitted wisdom and emotion which immortalises the
gains of the past and generalises the gains of the
present.

A system of free public education does more to de-
velop the brains of a people than many thousand years
of ^^ natural selection," and does not prevent natural
selection, either.

The one capacity wherein the world does not progress
as it should is the power of social intelligence; of a ra-

309

THE HOME

tional, efficiently acting, common consciousness. Our
** body politic " is like that of a vigorous, well-grown
idiot. We have all the machinery for large, rich, satis-
fying life ; and inside is the dim, limited mind, incapable
of enjoyment or action. It has been found in recent
years that idiocy may result from a too small skull ; the
bones have not enlarged, and the brain, compressed and
stunted, cannot perform its functions. In one case this
was most cruelly proven, by an operation upon an old
man, from birth and idiot. His skull was opened and so
treated as to give more room to the imprisoned brain,
and, with what hopeless horror can be imagined, the
man became intelligently conscious at last — conscious of
what his life had been !

There is some similar arrest in the development of the
social consciousness; else our cities would not sit gnaw-
ing and tearing at themselves, indifferent to dirt, disease,
or vice, and enjoying only physical comfort. If any
operation should give sudden new light to this long-
clouded civic brain, we might feel the same horror of the
years behind us, but not the same hopelessness — society
is immortal.

It is here suggested that one check to the social de-
velopment proper to our time is the pressure of the
rudimentary home. We are quite willing to admit that

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HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

a home life we consider wrong, as the Chinese or Turkish,
can paralyse a nation. We have even come to see that
the position of women is a good gauge of progress. Is
it so hard, then, to admit at least a possibility that the
position of our women, the nature of our homes, may
have some important influence upon our social growth?
There is no demand that we destroy the home, any more
than that we destroy the women, but we must change
their relative position.

The brain is the medium of social contact, the plane
of human development. The savage is incapable of large
relation because his mental area is not. big enough; he
is not used to such extensive combinations. Where
the brain is accustomed only to incessant considera-
tion of its own private interests, and to direct personal
service of those interests, it is thereby prevented from
developing the capacity for seeing the public inter-
ests, and for indirect collective service of those inter-
ests. The habit, continuous and unrelieved, of think-
ing in a small circuit checks the power to think in a
large circuit.

This arrested brain development, this savage limita- .
tion to the personal, and mainly to the physical, is what
we have so rigidly enforced upon women. The primitive
home to the primitive mind is sufficient ; but the progress

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THE HOME
of the mind requires a commensurate progress of the
home — and has not had it. Owing to our peculiar and
unnatural division of life-area, half the race has been
free to move on, and so has accomplished much for all
of us; but the other half, being confined to the same
position it occupied in the infancy of society, has been
denied that freedom and that progress. Owing again
to the inexorable reunion of these divided halves in each
child, physical heredity does what it can to bridge the
gulf, the ever-widening gulf ; pouring into the stationary
woman some share of the modem abilities of social man ;
and also forcing upon the moving man some share of the
primitive disabilities of the domestic woman. We thus
have a strange and painful condition of life.

Social progress, attained wholly by the male, gives to
the unprogressive woman unrest, discontent, disease.
The more society advances, the less she can endure her
ancient restrictions. Hence arises much evil and more
unhappiness. Domestic inertia, maintained by the
woman, gives to the progressive man a tremendous under-
tow of private selfishness and short-sightedness.
Hence more evil, far more; for the social processes are
the most important ; and a deeper unhappiness too ; for
the shame of the social traitor, the helplessness of the
home-bound man who knows his larger duty but cannot

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HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS
meet it, is a higher plane of suffering than hers, and
also adds to hers continually.

All this evil and distress is due not at all to the blessed
influence of the true home, suited to our time, but to the
anything but blessed influence of a home suited to the
Stone Age — or perhaps the Bronze ! It is not in the least
necessary. The change we require does not involve the
loss of one essential good and lovely thing. It does not
injure womanhood, but improves it. It does not injure
childhood, but improves it* It does not injure manhood,
but improves that too.

What is the proposed change? It is the recognition
of a new order of duties, a new scale of virtues ; or rather
it is the practical adoption of that order long since es-
tablished by the facts of business, the science of govern-
ment, and by all great religions. Our own religion in
especial, the most progressive, the most social, gives no
sanction whatever to our own archaic cult of home-
worship.

What is there in the teachings of Christianity to jus-
tify — ^much less command — ^this devotion to animal com-
fort, to physical relations, to the A B C of life? In his
own life Christ rose above all family ties ; his disciples he
called to leave all and follow him ; the devotion he recog-
nised was that of Mary to the truth, not of Martha to

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THE HOME

the housekeeping; and the love he taught, that lo^r
which is the beginning and the end of Christian life, is
not the love of one's own merely, but of the whole world.
*' Whoso coreth not for his own is worse than an infidel "
— ^truly. And whoso careth only for his own is no
better!

Besides — ^and this should reconcile the reluctant heart
—this antiquated method of serving the family does not
serve them to the best advantage. In what way does a
man best benefit his family? By staying at home and
doing what he can with his own two hands— whereby no
family on earth would ever have more than the labour
of one affectionate amateur could provide ; or by going
out from the home and serving other people in a special-
ised trade — ^whereby his family and all families are
gradually supplied with peace and plenty, supported
and protected by the allied forces of civilisation?

In what way does a woman best benefit her family?
By staying at home and doing what she can with her own
two hands — ^whereby no family ever has more than the
labour of one affectionate amateur can provide — or by
enlarging her motherhood as man has enlarged his
fatherhood, and giving to her family the same immense
advantages that he has given it? We have always as-
sumed that the woman could do most by staying at home.

814

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS
'i Is this so? Can we prove it? Why is that which is so
' palpably false of a man held to be true of a woman?
^ Because men and woman are different ! '' will be stoutly
replied. Of course they are different — ^in sex, hut not
in humanity. In every human quality and power they
are alike; and the right service of the home, the right
care and training of the child, call for human qualities
and powers, not merely for sex-<[istinctions.

The home, in its arbitrary position of arrested de-
velopment, does not properly fulfil its own essential
functions — ^much less promote the social ones. Among
the splendid activities of our age it lingers on, inert
and blind, like a clam in a horse-race.

It hinders, by keeping woman a social idiot, by keep-
ing the modem child under the tutelage of the primeval
mother, by keeping the social conscience of the man
crippled and stultified in the clinging grip of the do-
mestic conscience of the woman. It hinders by its
enormous expense; making the physical details of daily
life a heavy burden to mankind; whereas, in our stage
of civilisation, they should have been long since reduced
to a minor incident.

Consider what the mere protection and defence of life
used to cost, when every man had to be fighter most of
his life. Ninety per cent., say, of masculine energy went

816

THE HOME

to defend life ; while the remaining ten» and the women,
in a narrow, feeble way, maintained it. They lived, to
be sure, fighting all the time for the sorry privilege.
Now we have systematised military service so that only
a tiny fraction of our men, for a very short period of
life, need be soldiers; and peace is secured, not by con-
stant painful struggles, but by an advanced economic
system. ** Eternal vigilance ** may be ** the price of
liberty," but it is a very high price; and paid only by
the barbarian who has not risen to the stage of civilised
service.

Organisation among men has reduced this wasteful
and crippling habit of being every-man-his-own-soldier.
We do not have to carry a rifle and peer around every
street-comer for a hidden foe. As a result the
released energy of the ninety per cent, men, a tenth being
large allowance for all the fighting necessary, is now
poured into the channels that lead to wealth, peace,
education, general progress.

Yet we are still willing that the personal care of life,
the service of daily physical needs, shall monopolise as
manv women as that old custom of universal warfare
monopolised men! Ninety per cent, of the feminine
energy of the world is still spent in ministering labor-
iously to the last details of bodily maintenance; and the

316

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

other tenth is supposed to do nothing but supervise the
same tasks, and flutter about in fruitless social amuse*
ment. This crude waste of half the world's force keeps
back hrunan progress just as heavily as the waste of the
other half did.

By as much as the world has grown toward peace and
power and unity since men left off spending their lives
in universal warfare, will it grow further toward that
much-desired plane when women leave off spending their
lives in universal house-service. The mere release of
that vast fund of energy will in itself increase all the
facilities of living ; but there is a much more important
consequence.

The omnipresent domestic ideal is a deadly hinderance
to the social ideal. When half our population honestly
believe that they have no duties outside the home, the
other half will not become phenomenal statesmen. This
cook-and-housemaid level of popular thought is the great
check. The social perspective is entirely lost; and a
million short-sighted homes, each seeing only its own
interests, cannot singly or together grasp the common
good which would benefit them all.

That the home has improved as much as it has is due
to the freedom of man outside it. That it is still so
clumsy, so inadequate, so wickedly wasteful of time, of

317

THE HOME

money, of human life, is due to the confinement of
woman inside it.

TVhat sort of citizens do we need for the best city —
the best state — ^the best country — ^the best world? We
need men and women who are sufficiently large-minded to
see and feel a common need, to work for a conmaon good,
to rejoice in the advance of all, and to know as the merest
platitude that their private advantage is to be assured
only by the common wea]. That kind of mind is not
bred in the kitchen.

A citizenship wherein all men were either house-ser-
vants or idlers would not show much advance. Neither
does a community wherein all women, save that noble and
rapidly increasing minority of self-supporting ones, are
either house-servants or idlers. Our progress rests on
the advance of the people, all the people; the develop-
ment of an ever-widening range of feeling, thought,
action ; while its flowers are found in all the higher arts
and sciences, it is rooted firmly in economic law.

This little ganglion of aborted economic processes, the
home, tends to a sort of social paralysis. In its
innumerable little centres of egoism and familism are
sunk and lost the larger vibrations of social energy
which should stimulate the entire mass. Again, society's
advance rests on the personal health, sanity, and happi-

318

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS
ness of its members. The home, whose one justification
is in its ministering to these, does not properly fulfil its
purpose, and cannot unless it is managed on modem
lines.

Social progress rests on the smooth development of
personal character, the happy fulfilment of special
function. The home, in its ceaseless and inexorable de-
mands, stops this great process of specialisation in
women, and checks it cruelly in men. A man's best ser-
vice to society lies in his conscientious performance of the
work he is best fitted for. But the service of the home
demands that he do the work he is best paid for. Man
after man, under this benumbing, strangUng pressure, is
diverted from his true path in social service, and con-
demned to ^^ imprisonment with hard labour for life."

The young man, for a time, is comparatively free;
and looks forward eagerly to such and such a line of
growth and large usefulness. But let him marry and
start a home, and he mUst do, not what he would — ^what
is best for him and best for all of us ; but what he must —
what he can be sure of pay for. We have always sup-
posed this to be a good thing, as it forced men to be
industrious. As if it was any benefit to society to have
men industrious in wrong ways — or useless ways, or even
slow, stupid, old-fashioned ways !

319

THE HOME

Human advance calls for each man's best, for his
special faculties, for the work he loves best and can there-
fore do best and do most of. This work is not always
the kind that commands the greater wages ; at least the
immediate wages he must have. The market will pay
best for what it wants, and what it wants is almost always
what it is used to, and often what is deadly bad for it.
Having a family to support, in the most wasteful possi-
ble way, multiplies a man's desire for money ; but in no
way multiplies his ability, his social value.

Therefore the world is full of struggling men, putting
in for one and trying to take out for ten; and in this
struggle seeking continually for new ways to cater to the
tastes of the multitude, and especially to those of the
rich; that they may obtain the wherewithal to support
the ten, or six, or simply the one ; who though she be but
one and not a worker, is quite ready to consume more
than any ten together! Social advantage is ruthlessly
sacrificed to private advantage in our life to-day ; not to
necessary and legitimate private interests either; not to
the best service of the individual, but to false and
scandalously wasteful private interests; to the mainte-
nance and perpetuation of inferior people.

The position is this : the home, as now existing, costs
three times what is necessary to meet the same needs. It

320

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

involves the further waste of nearly half the world's
labour. It does not fulfil its functions to the best ad-
vantage, thus robbing us again. It maintains a low
grade of womanhood, overworked or lazy ; it checks the
social development of men as well as women, and, most of
all, of children. The man, in order to meet this un~
necessary expense, must cater to the existing market ; and
the existing market is mainly this same home, with its
crude tastes and limitless appetites. Thus the man, to
maintain his own woman in idleness, or low-grade labour,
must work three times as hard as is needful, to meet the
demands of similar women; the home-bound woman
clogging the whole world.

Change this order. Set the woman on her own feet,
as a free, intelligent, able human being, quite capable of
putting into the world more than she takes out, of being
a producer as well as a consumer. Put these poor anti-
quated ^^ domestic industries " into the archives of past
history; and let efficient modem industries take their
place, doing far more work, far better work, far cheaper
work in their stead.

With an enlightened system of feeding the world we
shall have better health — and wiser appetites. The
more intelligent and broad-minded woman will assuredly
promote a more reasonable, healthful, beautiful, and

881

THE HOME

economical system of clothing, for her own body and that
of the child. The wiser and more progressive mother
will at last recognise child-culture as an art and science
quite beyond the range of instinct, and provide for the
cliild such surroundings, such training, as shall allow
of a rapid and enormous advance in human character.

The man, relieved of two-thirds of his expenses ; pro-
vided with double supplies ; properly fed and more com-
fortable at home than he ever dreamed of being, and
associated with a strong, free, stimulating companion all
through life, will be able to work to far better purpose
in the social service, and with far greater power, pride,
and enjoyment.

The man and woman together, both relieved of most
of their personal cares, will be better able to appreciate
large social needs and to meet them. Each generation of
children, better bom, better reared, growing to their full
capacity in all lines, will pour into the world a rising
flood of happiness and power. Then we shall see social
progress.

SSg

XVI
LINES OF ADVANCE

IT will be helpful and encouraging for us to examine
the development of the home to this date, and its
further tendencies ; that we may cease to regret here,
and learn to admire there ; that we may use our personal
powers definitely to resist the undertow of habit and
prejudice, and definitely to promote all legitimate
progress.

There is a hopelessness in the first realisation of this
old-world obstacle still stationary in our swift to-day;
but there need not be. While apparently as strong as
ever, it has in reality been undermined on every side by
the currents of evolution ; its whilom prisoners have been
stimulated and strengthened by the unavoidable force
of those same great currents, and little remains to do
beyond the final opening of one's own eyes to the facts —
not one's grandmother's eyes, but one's cwn — ^and the
beautiful work of reconstruction.

Examine the main root of the whole thing — ^the ex-
clusive confinement of women to the home, to their
feminine functions and a few crude industries; and see

383

THE HOME

how rapidly that condition is changing. The advance
of women, during the last hundred years or so, is a

phenomenon unparalleled in history. Never before has
so large a class made as much progress in so small a time.
From the harem to the forum is a long step, but she has
taken it. From the ignorant housewife to the president
of a college is a long step, but she has taken it. From
the penniless dependent to the wholly self-supporting
and often other-supporting business woman, is a long
step, but she has taken it. She who knew so little is now
the teacher ; she who could do so little is now the efficient
and varied producer; she who cared only for her own
flesh and blood is now active in all wide good works
around the world. She who was confined to the house
now travels freely, the foolish has become wise, and the
timid brave. Even full political equality is won in more
ihan one country and state; it is a revolution of in-
credible extent and importance, and its results are
already splendidly apparent.

This vast number of human beings, formerly as
separate as sand grains and as antagonistic as the na-
ture of their position compelled, are now organising,
from house to club, from local to general, in federations
of city, state, nation, 'and world. The amount of social
energy accumulated by half of us is no longer possible

S%4

LINES OF ADVANCE
of confinement to that half; the woman has inherited
her share, and has grown so large and strong that her
previous surroundings can no longer contain or content
her.

The socialising of this hitherto subsodal, whoUy
domestic dass, is a marked and marvellous event, now
taking place with astonishing rapidity. That most
people have not observed it proves nothing. Mankind
has never yet properly perceived historic events until
time gave him the perspective his narrow present horizon
denied.

Where most of our minds are hcune-endosed, like the
visual range of one sitting in a hogshead, general events
make no impression save as they impinge directly on that
personal area. The change in the position of woman,
iBLTgelj taking place in the home, is lost to general view ;
and so far as it takes place in public, is only perceived in
fractions by most of us.

To man it was of course an unnatural and undesired
change ; he did not want it, did not see the need or good
of it, and has done all he could to prevent it. To the
still inert majority of women, content in their position,
or attributing their growing discontent to other causes,
it is also an unnatural and undesired change. Ideas do
not change as fast as facts, with most of us. Mankind

825

THE HOME
in general, men and women, still believe in the old estab-
lished order, in woman's ordination to the service of
bodily needs of all sorts; in the full sufficiency of
maternal instinct as compared with any trivial proposi-
tions of knowledge and experience ; in the noble devotion
of the man who spends all his labours to furnish a useless
woman with luxuries, and all the allied throng of ancient
myths and falsehoods.

Thus we have not been commonly alive to the full pro-
portions of the woman's movement, or its value. The
facts are there, however. Patient Griselda has gone out,
or is going, faster and faster. The girls of to-day, in '
any grade of society, are pushing out to do things in- ^
stead of being content to merely eat things, wear things,
and dust things. The honourable instinct of self-sup-
port is taking the place of the puerile acceptance of
gifts, and beyond self-support comes the still nobler
impulse to give to others ; not corrupting charity, but the
one all-good service of a life's best work. Measuring
the position of woman as it has been for all the years
behind us up to a century or so ago with what it is to-
day, the distance covered and the ratio of progress Is
incredible. It rolls up continually, accumulatively ; and
another fifty years will show more advance than the past
five hundred.

826

LINES OP ADVANCE

This alone is enough to guarantee the development of
the home. No unchanging shell can contain a growing
body, something must break; and the positive force of
growth is stronger than the negative force of mere ad-
hesion of particles. A stronger, wiser, nobler woman
must make a better home.

In the place itself, its customs and traditions, we can
also note great progress. The " domestic industries '*
have shrunk and dwindled almost out of sight, so greed-
ily has society sucked at them and forced them out where
they belong.

The increasing difficulties which assail the house-
keeper, either in trying to occupy the primeval position
of doing her own work, or in persuading anyone else to
do it for her, are simply forcing us, however reluctantly,
to the adoption of better methods. Even in the most
neglected field of all, the care and education of the little
child, some progress has been made. Education in the
hands of men, broad-minded, humanly loving men, has
crept nearer and nearer to the cradle; and now even
women, and not only single women, but even mothers^
are beginning to study the nature and needs of the
child. The more they study, the more they learn, the
more impossible become the home conditions. The
mother cannot herself alone do all that is necessary for

327

THE HOME
her children, to say nothing of continuing to be a com-
panion to her husband, a member of society, and a stiU
growing individual

She can sacrifice herself in the attempt, — often does, —
but the child has a righteous indifference to such f utik
waste of life. He does not require a nervous, exhausted,
ever-present care, and it is by no means good for him.
He wants a strong, serene, lovely mother for a comfort,
a resource, an ideal; but he ako wants the care of a
trained highly qualified teacher, and the amateur mama
cannot give it to him. Motherhood is a common
possession of every female creature; a joy, a pride, a
nobly useful function. Teacherhood is a profession, a
specialised social function, no more common to mothers
than to fathers, maids, or bachelors. The ceaseless,
anxious strain to do what only an experienced nurse and
teacher can do, is an injury to the real uses of mother-
hood.

Why do we dread having children, as many of our
much-extolled mothers so keenly do? Partly the
physical risk and suffering, which are not neces-
sary to a normal woman, — ^and more the ensuing care,
labour, and anxiety, — and oh, — ^** the responsibility ! "
The more modem the mother is, the more fit for
a higher plane of execution, the more imfit she is for

S28

LINES OF ADVANCE
the lower plane, the old primitiTe plane of home-
teaching.

If your father is a combination of all college pro-
fessors you may get part of a college training at home —
but not the best part. If your mother is a bom teacher,
a trained teacher, an experienced teacher, you may get
part of your schooling at home — ^but not the best parL
There would never have been a school or college on earthy
if every man had remained content with teaching his
boys at home. There will never be any proper standard
of training for little children while each woman remains
content with caring for her own at home. But the house-
wife is changing. These ways no longer satisfy her.
She insists on more modem methods, even in her ancient
labours.

Then follows the equally different attitude of the
housemaid; her rebellion, refusal, retirement from the
field ; and the immense increase in mechanical convenience
seeping in steadily from outside, and doing more to
" undermine the home " than any wildest exhortations
of reformers. The gas range, the neat and perfect
utensils, these have in themselves an educational reaction;
we cannot now maintain the atmosphere ** where greasy
Joan doth keel the pot." The pot is a white enamelled
double boiler, and Joan need not be greasy save of

329

THE HOME
malice prepense. Besides the improver lent of utensils,
we have in our cities and in most of the smaller towns
that insidious new system of common fapply of domestic
necessities, which webs together the once so separate
homes by a network of pipes and wires.

Our houses are threaded like beads on a string, tied,
knotted, woven together, and in the cities even built to-
gether; one solid house from block-end to block-end;
their boasted individuality maintained by a thin parti-
tion wall. The tenement, flat, and apartment house still
further group and connect us ; and our claim of domestic
isolation becomes merely another domestic myth. Water
is a household necessity and was once supplied by house-
hold labour, the women going to the wells to fetch it.
Water is now supplied by the municipality, and flows
among our many homes as one. Light is equally in
common ; we do not have to make it for ourselves.

Where water and light are thus fully socialised, why
are we so shy of any similar progress in the supply of
food? Food is no more a necessity than water. If we
are willing to receive our water from an extra-domestic
pipe — ^why not our food? The one being a simple
element and the other a very complex combination makes
a diff^erence, of course ; but even so we may mark great
progress. Some foods, more or less specific, and of

SSO

LINES OF ADVANCE

universal use, were early segregated, and the making ot
them became a trade, as in breadstuffs, cheese, and
confectionery. There this has been done we find great
progress, and an even standard of excellence. In
America, where the average standard of bread-making is
very low, we regard " baker's bread " as a synonym for
inferiority; but even here, if we consider the saleratus
bread of the great middle west, and all the sour, heavy,
uncertain productions of a million homes, the baker bears
comparison with the domestic cook. It is the mainten-
ance of the latter that keeps the former down ; where the
baker is the general dependence he makes better bread.

Our American baker's bread has risen greatly in excel*
lence as we make less and less at home. All the initial
processes of the food supply have been professionalised.
Our housewife does not go out crying, " Dilly-dilly !
Dilly-dilly ! You must come and be killed " — ^and then
wring the poor duck's neck, pick and pluck it with her
own hands ; nor does the modem father himself slay the
fatted calf — all this is done as a business. In recent
years every article of food which will keep, every article
which is in common demand, is prepared as a business.

The home-blinded toiler has never climbed out of her
hogshead to watch this rising tide, but it is nearly up
to the rim, ready to pour in and float her out. Every

831

THE HOME

delicate confection, every pickle, sauce, preserve^ every
species of biscuit and wafer, and all sublimated and
differentiated to a degree we could never have dreamed
of ; all these are manufactured in scientific and business
methods and delivered at our doors, or our dumb-waiters.
Brecikf ast foods are the latest step in this direction ; and
the encroaching delicatessen shop with its list of allure-
ments. Even the last and dearest stronghold, the very
core and centre of domestic bliss — ^hot cooked food — is
being served us by this irreverent professional man.

The sacred domestic rite of eating may be still per-
formed in the sanctuary, but the once equally sacred,
subsidiary art of cooking is swiftly going out of it. As
to eating at home, so dear a habit, so old a haUt, old
enough to share with every beast that drags her prey
into her lair, that she and her little ones may gnaw in
safety; tliis remains strongly in evidence, and will for
some time yet. But while it reigns unshakai in our
minds let us follow, open-eyed, the great human distinc-
tion of eating together. To share one's food, to call
guest and friend to the banquet, is not a cust(»n of any
animal save those close allies in social organisation, the
ants and their compeers. Not only do we permit this^
but it is our chief est joy and pride. From the child
plajing tea-partj to the Lord Mayor's Banquet, the

332

LINES OF ADVANCE

human race shows a marked tendency to eat together.
It is our one great common mediimi — ^more's the pity
that we have none better as yet ! To share food is the
first impulse of true hospitality, the largest field of
artificial extravagance. Moreover, in actual fact, in the
working world, food is eaten together by almost all men
at noon ; and by women and men in what they call ** social
life " almost daily. In recent years, in our cities, this
habit increases widely, swiftly ; men, women, and families
eat together more and more; and the eating-house in**
creases in excellence commensurately.

Whatever our opinion of these two facts, both are
facts — that we like to eat in " the bosom of the family "
and that we equally like to eat in common. Why, then,
do we so fear a change in this field? ** Because of the
children ! " most people will reply triumphantly. Are
the children, then, perfectly fed at home? Is the list of
dietary diseases among our home-fed little ones a thing
to boast of? May it be hinted that it is because child-
feeding has remained absolutely domestic, while man-
feeding has become partially civilised, that the knowl-
edge of how to feed children is so shamefully lacking?
Be all this as it may, it is plainly to be seen that our
domestic conditions as to food supply are rapidly chang-
ing, and that all signs point to a steady rise in efficiency

833

THE HOME

and decrease in expense in this line of human service.
There remains much to be done. In no field of modem
industry and business opportunity is there a wider de-
mand to be met than in this constantly waxing demand
for better food, more hygienic food, more reliable food,
cheaper food, food which shall give us the maximum of
nutrition and healthy pleasure, with the minimum of
effort and expense. At this writing — ^May, 1903 —
there is in flourishing existence a cooked-food supply
company, in New Haven (Conn.), in Pittsburgh (Pa.),
and in Boston (Mass.), with doubtless others not at
present known to the author.

Turning to the other great domestic industry, the care
of children, we may see hopeful signs of growth. The
nursemaid is improving. Those who can afford it are
beginning to see that the association of a child's first
years with low-class ignorance cannot be beneficial.
There is a demand for " trained nurses " for children ;
even in rare cases the employment of some Kindergarten
ability. Among the very poor the day-nursery and
Kindergarten are doing slow, but beautiful work. The
President of Harvard demands that more care and money
be spent on the primary grades in education; and all
through our school systems there is a healthy movement.
Child-study is being undertaken at last. Pedagogy is

334

LINES OP ADVANCE

being taught as a science. In our public parks there
is regular provision made for children ; and in the worst
parts of the cities an incipient provision of play-
grounds.

There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day than
this new thought about the child. In what does it con-
sist? In recognising **the child," children as a class,
children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only
by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward
them of absolute personal ownership — ^the unchecked
tyranny, or as unchecked indulgence, of the private
home. Children are at last emerging from the very
lowest grade of private ownership into the safe, broad
level of common citizenship. That which no million
separate families could give their millions of separate
children, the state can give, and does. Our progress, so
long merely mechanical, is at last becoming personal,
touching the people and lifting them as one.

Now what is all this leading to? What have we to
hope — or to dread — ^in the undeniable lines of develop-
ment here shown? What most of us dread is this: that
we shall lose our domestic privacy; that we shall lose
our family dinner table; that woman will lose "her
:;harm ; " that we shall lose our children ; and the child
lose its mother. We are mortally afraid of separation.

335

THE HOME

The unfolding and differentiation of natural growth is
not separation in any organic sense. The fiye-fingered
leaf, closely bound in the bud, separates as it opens.
The branches separate from the trunk as the trees grow.
But this legitimate separation does not mean disconnec-
tion. The tree is as much one tree as if it grew in a
strait- jacket. All growth must widen and diverge.
If natural growth is checked, disease must follow. If
allowed, health and beauty and happiness accompany it.

The home, if it grows on in normal lines, wiU not be
of the same size and relative density as it was in ancient
times ; but it will be as truly home to the people of to-
day. In trying to maintain by force the exact limits
and characteristics of the primitive home, we succeed only
in making a place modem man is not at home in.

The people of our time need the home of our time, not
the homes of ancient barbarians. The primitive home
and the home-bound woman are the continually acting
causes of our increasing domestic unhappiness. By
clinging to unsuitable conditions we bring about exactly
the evils we are most afraid of. A little scientific im-
agination well based on existing facts, well in line with
existing tendencies, should be used to point out the
practical possibilities of the home as it is to be.

Try to consider it first with the woman out for werk-

336

LINES OF ADVANCE

big hours. This is an impassable galf to the average
mind. ^* Home, with the woman out — ^there is no such
thing!" cries it. The instant assumption is that she
will never be in, in which case I am willing to admit that
there would be no home. Suppose we retrace our steps
a little and approach the average mind more gradually.
Can it imagine a home, a real happy home, with the
woman out of it for one hour a day? Can it, encour*
aged by this step, picture the home as still enduring
while the woman is out of it two hours a day? Is there
any exact time of attendance required to make a home?
What is, in truth, required to make a home? First
mother and child, then father; this is the family, and
the place where they live is the home.

Now the father goes out every day; does the home
cease to exist because of his hours away from it? It is
Still his home, he still loves it, he maintains it, he lives in
it, only he has a " place of business " elsewhere. At a
certain stage of growth the children are out of it,
between say 8.30 and 8.80. Does it cease to be home
because of their hours away from it? Do they not love
it and live in it — while they are there? Now if, while
the father was out, and the children were out, the mother
should also be out, would the home disappear into thin
air?

837

THE HOME

It is home while the farnXLy are in it. When the family
are out of it it is only a house ; and a house will stand up
quite solidly for some eight hours of the family's absence.
Incessant occupation is not essential to a home. If the
father has wife and children with him in the home when
he returns to it, need it matter to him that the children
are wisely cared for in schools during his absence; or
that his wife is duly occupied elsewhere while they are
so cared for?

Two " practical obstacles " intervene ; first, the ** house-
work " ; second, the care of children below school age.
The housework is fast disappearing into professional
hands. When that is utterly gone, the idle woman has
but one excuse — the babies. This is a very vital excuse.
The baby is the founder of the home. If the good of
the baby requires the persistent, unremitting care of the
mother in the home, then indeed she must remain there.
No other call, no other claim, no other duty, can be
weighed for a moment against this aU-important service
— ^the care of the little child.

But we have already seen that if there is one thing
more than another the home fails in, it is just this. If
there is one duty more than another the woman f afls in, it
is just this. Our homes are not planned nor managed
in the interests of little children ; and the isolated home-

338

LINES OF ADVANCE
bound mother is in no way adequate to their proper
rearing. This is. not disputable on any side. The death
rate of little children during the years they are wholly
in the home and mother's care proves it beyond question.
The wailing of little children who live — or before they
die — ^wailing from bodily discomfort, nervous irritation^
mental distress, punishment — ^a miserable sound, so com-
mon, so expected, that it affects the price of real estate,
tenants not wishing to live near little children on account
of their cries — ^this sound of world-wide anguish does
not seem to prove much for the happiness of these help-
less inmates of the home.

Such few data as we have of babies and young chil-
dren in properly managed day nurseries, give a far
higher record of health and happiness. Not the sick
baby in the pauper hospital, not the lonely baby in the
orphan asylum ; but the baby who has not lost his mother,
but who adds to mother's love, calm, wise, experienced
professional care.

The best instance of this, as known to me, is that of
M. Godin's phalcmstire in Guise, France. An account
of it can be found in the Harper* s Monthly^ November,
1885 ; or in M. Godin's own book, " Social Solutions,'*
translated by Marie Howland, now out of print. This
wise and successful undertaking had been going on for

339 '

THE HOME
pyer twenty years when the aboye article was written.
Among its features was a beautifully planned nursery
for babies and little children, and the results to child
and parent, to home and state were wholly good. Better
health, greater peace and contentment, a swift, regular,
easy deyelopment these children enjoyed; and when, in
later years, they met the examinations of the public
schools, they stood higher than the children of any other
district in France.

A newborn baby leads a far happier, healthier, more
peaceful existence in the hands of the good trained nurse,
than it does when those skilled hands are gone, and it is
left on the trembling knees of the young, untrained
mother. .

** But the nurse does not love it ! " we wildly protest.
What if she does not? Ccmnot the mother love it whXLe
the nurse takes care of it? This is the whole position in
a nutshell. Nothing is going to prevent the mother from
loving her children in one deep, cecuseless river of calm
affection, with such maternal trcmsports as may arise
from time to time in addition; but nothing ought to
prevent the child's being properly taken care of while
the love is going on. l^e mother is not ashamed to
depend on the doctor if the child is ill, on the specialist
if the child is defective, on the teacher when the child is

840

LINES OF ADVANCE
in school. Why should she so passionately refuse to
depend on equally skilled assistance for the first five
years of her babies' lives—those years when iron static*
tics remorselessly expose Her incapacity?

The home that is coming will not try to be a work-
shop, a nursery, or a school. The child that is coming
will find a more comfortable home than he ever had
before, and something eke besides — ^a place for babies to
be happy in, and grow up in, without shrieks of pain.
The mother that is coming, a much more intelligent per*
son than she has ever been before, will recognise that this
ceaseless procession of little ones requires some practical
provision for its best development, other than what is
possible in the passing invasion of the home. ^^ How a
baby does tyrannise over the household ! " we complaiui
vaguely recognising that the good of the baby requires
something different from the natural home habits of
adults. We shall finally learn to make a home for the
babies too.

This involves great changes in both our idea of homei
and our material provision for it. Why not? Growth
is change, and there is need of growth here. Slowly,
gradually, by successive experiments, we shall find out
how to meet new demands; and these experiments are
now being made, in all the living centres of population.

341

xvn

RESULTS

TO us, who have for so many unbroken genera*
tions been wholly bound to the home, who
honestly believe that its service and mainte-
nance constitute the whole duty of men and women, the
picture of a world in which home and its affairs takes but
a small part of life's attention gives rather a blank out-
look. What else are we to do! What else to love —
what else to serve eternally! What else to revere, to
worship ! How shall we occupy the hands of man if but
a tithe of his labour supports him in comfort ; how fill the
heart of woman, when her family are happily and rightly
served without sacrificing her in the operation! It is
hard, at first — ^we being so accustomed to spend all life
in merely keeping ourselves alive — ^to see what life might
be when we had some to spare. We find it difficult to
imagine this " world of trouble " as rid of its troubles ;
as rationally and comfortably managed ; peaceful, dean,
safe, healthy, giving everyone room and time to grow.
Nor need we labour to forecast events too accurately;
especially the material details which must be decided by

342

RESULTS

long experiment. No rigid prescription is needed; no
dictum as to whether we shall live in small separate
houses, greenly gardened, with closely connected con^
veniences for service and for education, for work and
play; or in towering palaces with shaded flower-bright
courts and cloisters. All that must work out as have our
great modem wonders in other lines, little by little, in
orderly development. But what we can forecast in
safety is the effect on the human body and the human
soul.

A peaceful, healthy, happy babyhood and childhood,
with such delicate adjustment of educational processes as
we already see indicated, will give us a far better in-
dividual. The full-grown mother, contributing racial
advance in both body and mind, will add greatly to this
gain. We can be better people everywhere, better bom,
bred, fed, educated in all ways. But quite beyond this
is the rich growth of our long aborted social in-
stincts, which will rapidly follow the reduction of these
long artificially maintained primitive and animal in-
stincts.

Where now trying to meet general needs by personal
efforts, modem needs by ancient methods, we must per-
force manifest an intense degree of self-interest to keep
up the struggle; as soon as we meet these needs easily,

843

THE HOME

swiftly, inexi>eii8iTel7, by modem methods and cnmmcm
efforts, less self-interest will be necessary*

When sidewalks were narrow and streets fool, great
was the jostling, keen the resentment — ^ You take the
wall of me, sir ! " Where all is broad, clean, safe, no
such hot feeling exists. We do not truly prefer to be
always sharply looking out for ourselves ; it is much more
interesting to look out for each other ; but this method
of handicapping each man with his own affiairs, in such
needless weight, keeps up a selfishness which true civilisa-
tion tends steadily to eliminate. Social instincts in
social conditions are as natural as animal instincts in
animal conditions.

Starving, shipwrecked sailors, robbed of all social
advantages, are reduced sometimes even to cannibalism.
Polite people at a banquet show no hint of such fierce^
relentless greed. Relieved of the necessity for spending
our whole time taking care of ourselves, we shall deli-
ciously launch forward into the much larger pleasure of
taking care of one another. Relieved of the ceaseless,
instant pressure of purely physical needs, we shall be
able to put forth the true demands of human life at last.
The mind, nd longer penned in its weary treadmill of
private affairs, will spread into its legitimate area —
public affairs. We shall be able to see a greater number

S44*

RESULTS

of things at once, and care about them. That largep-
mindedness will be an immediate result; for we have
already far more capacity than we use.

We have developed the modem civilised mind, the
social mind, through the world's work ; but we bury it,
enslave it, stultify it, in the home's work. A new power
— ^a new sense of range — ^freedom, growth, as of a great
stream flowing freely; plenty of force to work with,
plenty of room to work in — ^this is what will follow as
we learn to properly relate the home to the rest of life.

Once the mind rises, free, outside those old enclosings
crushing walls, it will see life with different eyes. Our
common good will appear to us as naturally as oat
private good does now. At present the average mind
does not seem able to grasp a great general fact, be it
for good or evil.

To make a man appreciate the proposed advantage,
realise the impending or existing evil, we must ** bring
it home to him,*' make him feel it *' where he lives."
When his home does not occupy most of his mind, tax
his strength, reduce his range of interest and affection,
he can see the big things more easily. When he ** lives ^
in the whole city — i. ^., thinks about it, cares about it,
works for it, loves it — then he will promptly feel any-
thing that affects it in any part. This common love and

345

THE HOME

care are just as possible to human beings as love and care
for one's own young are possible to the beasts. It is
possible; it is natural; it is a great and increasing joy;
but its development is checked by a system which requires
all our love and care for our own, and even then does not
properly provide for them.

The love of human beings for each other is not a dream
of religion, it is a law of nature. It is bred of human
contact, of human relation, of human service; it rests
on identical interest and the demands of a social develop-
ment which must include all, if it permanently lift any.
Against this perfectly natural development stands this
opposing shell ; this earlier form of life, essential in its
place, most mischievous out of it; this early cradle of
humanity in which lie smothered the full-grown people
of to-day.

Must we then leave it — ^lose it — go without it? Never.
The more broadly socialised we become, the more we need
our homes to rest in. The large area is necessary for the
human soul; the big, modem, civilised social nature.
But we are still separate animal beings as well as collec-
tive social beings. Always we need to return to the dear
old ties, to the great primal basis, that we may rise re-
freshed and strengthened, like Antaeus from the earth.
Private, secluded, sweet, wholly our own ; not invaded by

346

RESULTS
•ny trade or work or business, not open to the crowd ; the
place of the one initial and undying group of father^
mother, and child, will remain to us. These, and the real
friend, are all that belong to the home.

It should be the recognised base and background of
our lives ; but those lives must be lived in their true area,
the world. And so lived, by both of us, all of us ; shared
in by the child, served in by the woman as well as the
man ; that world will grow to have the sense of intimacy,
of permanent close attachment, of comfort and pleasure
and rest, which now attaches only to the home.

So, living, really living in the world and loving it, the
presence there of father, mother, and child will gradu-
ally bring out in it all the beauty and safety, the re-
freshment and strength we so vainly seek to ensure in
our private home. The sense of duty, of reverence, of
love, honestly transferred to the world we live in, will
have its natural, its inevitable effect, and make that world
our home at last.

THB xmi

847

BOOKS BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS OILMAN

The Man-made World,

or:

Our Androcentric Culture.

By
CHARLOTTE PERKINS OILMAN

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character and actions so discussed.

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Too much of women's influence is dreaded as '' fem-
inization ** — as likely to render our culture ** e£feminate.*'

Too much of men's influence is here studied as *' mas-
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is no analogue for ''effeminate."

We have heard much of the "eternal womanly;"
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book raises a new one: ** Cherchez Phomme!**

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U. S. A.

SUBSCRIPTION PER YEAR:

Domestic- - - |1.00
Canadian - - - 1.12
Foreign - - - 1.26

This magazine carries Mrs. Oilman's best and
newest work ; her social philosophy, verse, satire,
fiction, ethical teaching, humor, and opinion.

It stands for Humanness in Women, and in Men ; for bet-
ter methods in Child-culture ; for the New Ethics, the New
Economics, the New World we are to make — are making.

ORDERS TAKEN FOR
Bound Vols, of first year, |1.25

Books by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Women and Economics $1.50

Concerning Children 1.25

In This Our World (verse) 1.25

The Yellow Wallpaper (story) 0.50

The Home 1.00

Human Work 1.00

What Diantba Did (novel) 1.00

The Man-made World ; or, Our Androcen-
tric Culture 1.00

CHARLTON COMPANY. 6T Wall St., New Yori

. 1 ■ •

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Full text of "The Home, Its Work and Influence"

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